The API cut ended up being in a different place with LLVM and WebAssembly. But the core idea still stands, and has been a hot potato for many years. In some way

The API cut ended up being in a different place with LLVM and WebAssembly. But the core idea still stands, and has been a hot potato for many years. In some ways, things are better now since there are fewer architectures than in the 90'es, so you don't have to support that many backends. On the other, things are worse because the amount of work you have to sink into a backend is non-trivial and ever growing. One particular key aspect is that languages which have strong functional features tend to mismatch with typical imperative backends. This has been true for LLVM. It is unfortunate, because in reality, most IRs are essentially best described as small functional languages: they make state passing explicit, as it exposes better optimization analysis. SSA-form is functional programming in disguise.