I know how easily internet comments land on sensitive feelings—it happens to me every day—but this reply breaks the site guidelines. It takes the thread in an off-topic, unsubstantive direction, and it doesn't do what we ask here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) Even though it felt like geocar was lecturing you, the stronger plausible and good-faith interpretation was to assume otherwise. In that case the discussion could have continued to exchange substantive information and readers could have learned more.
I'm sorry, but people with real expertise view everything as a complicated engineering trade off that's highly dependent on context.
That you're willing to jump in and unilaterally declare a common strategy used by hordes of clever people as a Bad Idea pointing only to your years of experience as proof probably says more about you than it does about the merits of the technique in question.
I sure hope it says something about me. And just for the record, IT is this terrible cesspit of reinvented wheels by hordes, so yeah, hordes are not right. Never will be.
So what do you propose instead of using an IR? No serious compiler for decades has been without an IR, going straight to machine code. Do you have some new idea? Or do you think we should go back to syntax-directed translation? I'm not sure that's tractable - performance would be terrible.
