[alextingle]

I don't imagine that the exposed state would need to be represented in the final compiler output, so the optimiser could mark the pointer as exposed, but still eliminate the dead integer load.

Or from a pragmatic viewpoint, perhaps if the optimiser eliminates a dead load, then don't mark the pointer as exposed? After all, the whole point is to keep track of whether a synthesised pointer might potentially refer to the exposed pointer's storage. There's zero danger of that happening if the integer load never actually occurs.

[Hercuros]

I guess the internal exposure state would be “wrong” if the compiler removes the dead load (e.g in a pass that runs before provenance analysis).

However, if all of the program paths from that point onward behave the same as if the pointer was marked as exposed, that would be fine. It’s only “wrong” to track the incorrect abstract machine state when that would lead to a different behaviour in the abstract machine.

In that sense I suppose it’s no different from things like removing a variable initialisation if the variable is never used. That also has a side effect in the abstract machine, but it can still be optimised out if that abstract machine side effect is not observable.