Technical Report: Firm, an Intermediate Language for Compiler Research

State of the art compiler intermediate representations incorporate SSA data dependencies in a graph based manner. We present the intermediate representation firm, which extends the functional stores of Steensgard and introduces a novel representation of exceptions. Firm offers a high-level representation of the type hierarchy and object-oriented features, which makes it exceptional suitable for analysing and optimizing of strongly typed languages. The construction interface automates value numbering and the generation of SSA typical Phi operations. Firm comes with a full blown range of standard optimizations and analyses. In the paper we show that Firm requires 53% less operationss and 80% less Phi operations than the SSA representation of the gcc compiler.