FYI, LLVM was a byproduct of Chris Lattner's PhD thesis titled "Macroscopic Data Structure Analysis and Optimization", which aimed to do exactly that. It is sti

FYI, LLVM was a byproduct of Chris Lattner's PhD thesis titled "Macroscopic Data Structure Analysis and Optimization", which aimed to do exactly that. It is still a great paper. Alas, it was found that doing the basics well is much harder and larger task than doing the proof of concept of very clever optimizations.