&quot; 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.&quot;<p>Compilers have pretty much been the way (with the exception of GCC) since about 1975, if not earlier.
:)<p>LLVM is deliberately low level.
SWIFT uses a higher level IR because they want to do static analysis and language specific optimizations on it.
This makes sense, LLVM&#x27;s IR is not going to be good at that.<p>You could transmit metadata, but it&#x27;s probably not a good architectural solution compared to progressive lowering of IR.