Today is the day that Diego is merging the tree-ssa branch of GCC into mainline.

Here's a brief description of Static Single Assignment. My introduction to SSA form came in the early '90s when I developed a programming environment for a 3D information animation system using SSA based optimizations. The decision to use SSA form was a no-brainer since virtually all optimization algorithms being published back then (and since) assumed you were starting from SSA form. So why wasn't GCC using it?

GCC had grown up using its own low-level internal representation called RTL. And while SSA form saw a sudden explosion in popularity, migrating GCC over to use SSA was going to be a massive effort - more than anyone was willing to invest in themselves. Eventually Red Hat found themselves in a position to put the requisite resources to bear and, once the ball was rolling, support from the rest of the GCC community grew strong.

So this has really been a long time coming for GCC. Just getting this far has taken several man years of effort, and there's still a lot of work to do. Now that GCC has the basic SSA infrastructure in place, the focus will be on replacing (or supplementing) the old, low level RTL based optimizations with SSA versions.

For gcj, this means that we're finally getting some decent infrastructure to build important java-specific optimizations around (escape analysis, array bounds checking removal, etc).

Congratulations to all the hackers and backers who made this possible.