The essential parts are two-fold: 0. There is no magic anywhere. Anywhere down a stack, in a system or in code, they are all just bits of code. The behavior li

The essential parts are two-fold: 0. There is no magic anywhere. Anywhere down a stack, in a system or in code, they are all just bits of code. The behavior lives somewhere. (Genchi genbutsu.) 1. Get the point A. to the point B is dataflow analysis. One can even deconstruct the RTL micro- and macrocode designs of a CPU or GPU this way. Input, process, output, and feedback encapsulate represented behavior be it a shell pipe, streaming IO class, Kafka, firewall, audio effect generator, or microcontroller. Static compilers try to be efficient data flow analysts with as much liveness and constraint information as possible to apply optimization transformations. It's interesting that static optimization passes act are usually implemented as middleware patterns that stack.