[Jeaye]

I spoke with a couple Clang and LLVM devs about MLIR when I was doing the original design for jank's IR. The general consensus was that MLIR added a great deal of complexity on top of designing/implementing an IR and nobody was confident it was actually worth the effort. Since I knew exactly what I wanted, I just built that.

[CalChris]

Your custom IR is above LLVM’s IR, correct? Is it like SwiftIR then? Maybe you could add a paragraph or two going through that design decision.

[Jeaye]

jank's custom IR is completely separate and unrelated to LLVM IR, aside from both of them being SSA-based IRs. We go from jank's AST into jank's IR into C++, which we then give to Clang compile into the LLVM JIT runtime. So LLVM IR is used in the pipeline, but we don't touch it directly. More info on that, and a diagram, is here: https://book.jank-lang.org/dev/ir.html (which I linked in the post)