To appreciate the “fast” part, nothing beats reading though LuaJIT’s lj_opt_fold.c, none of which would work without SSA. Of course, LuaJIT is cheating, becaus

To appreciate the “fast” part, nothing beats reading though LuaJIT’s lj_opt_fold.c, none of which would work without SSA. Of course, LuaJIT is cheating, because compared to most compilers it has redefined the problem to handling exactly two control-flow graphs (a line and a line followed by a loop), so most of the usual awkward parts of SSA simply do not apply. But isn’t creatively redefining the problem the software engineer’s main tool?..