James Stanier, Alan Lawrence. The Value State Dependence Graph Revisited. In Florent Bouchez, Sebastian Hack, Eelco Visser, editors, Proceedings of the Workshop on Intermediate Representations. pages 53-60, 2011.
Graph-based intermediate representations (IRs) based solely on data flow have seen little use in mainstream compilers. We give an overview of current research to date with one of these IRs, the Value State Dependence Graph (VSDG), and show its relation to imperative and functional programming. We show a method for generating a functional program from a VSDG, and explore the difficulty of generating sequential code from it, discussing our efforts to date. We then conjecture potential future research with the graph, which we hope will inspire others to consider it for their own research.