SSA form is functional programming. As in the paper, but also it's quite literally true. The really gnarly part of compiling languages is dealing with load/sto

SSA form is functional programming. As in the paper, but also it's quite literally true. The really gnarly part of compiling languages is dealing with load/store. If you translate a functional language to SSA form, what you get is an IR which doesn't have load/store in it. I.e. that's easy mode. I'd suggest compile to SSA with implicit memory semantics, then somewhat later splice in the part of the language runtime that deals with memory management and now you have an imperative SSA form, continue as usual. That is, they're the same problem really.