> How would maintaining a SSA representation of the code help detecting dead code paths? Well, if a variable assigned but never appears in a path that might ha

> How would maintaining a SSA representation of the code help detecting dead code paths? Well, if a variable assigned but never appears in a path that might have side effects it's dead. It's only the halting problem if you pretend to catch 100% of cases under all inputs. You can find lots of dead code without it. For more information about the specific technique of DCE under SSA form see http://grothoff.org/christian/teaching/2007/3353/papers/ssa.pdf http://grothoff.org/christian/teaching/2007/3353/papers/ssa....