1) Using one of the more efficient CPS transformations will help remove many stupid constructs that are harder to statically find later. 2) In our CPS-based in

1) Using one of the more efficient CPS transformations will help remove many stupid constructs that are harder to statically find later. 2) In our CPS-based intermediate representation, we rely heavily on control flow analysis (CFA) to enable many classic compiler optimizations (inlining, untupling, unreachable code elimination, cases where only one member of a datatype is constructed/destructed, etc.). CPS is a great transformation and makes for a wonderful IR, but you have to pay a decent static analysis cost before you will be able to perform many classic optimizations and get great performance. That said, we've done pretty well (http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu ), but it's taken years of development. I'd also like to second cjfrisz's pointer to Appel's green book. It's a fabulous introduction to compiling in a CPS-style IR, though you'll find you still have a fairly large performance gap if you don't implement the CFA-based versions of them.