Introducing MIR
I'm incredibly psyched for MIR. It'll represent the first conceptual "leap" for the language since Rust 1.0, checking off (or at least unblocking) a ton of the improvements that we've had in mind for years now (the list in the OP is hardly comprehensive!).<p>It's also interesting that Swift, another LLVM-based project, has also transitioned to using their own language-specific intermediate representation (SIL). I think it's fascinating that, despite the availability of a robust and mature pluggable language backend, two professional languages independently decided that they needed <i>another</i> layer of abstraction between AST and LLVM IR. Not sure if this should be interpreted as a bug report against LLVM IR, or if it possibly represents a future trend in compiler design.<p>EDIT: I should also mention that MIR has been available on play.rust-lang.org for a while, if anyone would like to play with it in their browser: <a href="https://play.rust-lang.org/?gist=fee8ccf28bae2c89107d&version=nightly" rel="nofollow">https://play.rust-lang.org/?gist=fee8ccf28bae2c89107d&versio...</a>