Given how long it took LLVM to become competitive with GCC (and LLVM has been SSA <i>from the start</i>), even with a world-class team of optimization experts behind it, I think history has shown that it takes a long time to compete with mature optimizing compiler pipelines. There&#x27;s no substitute for the long engineering slog of tuning a generational GC and implementing algebraic simplifications, alias analysis, devirtualization, SROA, SCCP, instruction selection, instruction scheduling, autovectorization, LICM at multiple IR-levels, etc. No silver bullet substitute for the hard engineering work exists (other than using an off-the-shelf backend, of course).<p>Microbenchmarks are one thing; breadth and depth are another. It doesn&#x27;t take much to compete with GCC in a loop summing integers (unless GCC vectorizes that loop or precomputes the value, of course!) but competing on SPECINT is quite another.