Interesting read. I’ve often wondered why the projection we see needs to be the same as the stored artifact. Even something like a git diff should be viewable via a projection of the source IR.

With things like treesitter and the like, I sometimes daydream about what an efficient and effective HCI for an AST or IR would look like.

Things like f#s ordered compilation often make code reviews more simple for me, but that’s because a piece of the intermediate form (dependency order) is exposed to me as a first class item. I find it much more simple to reason about compared to small changes in code with more lax ordering requirements, where I often find myself jumping up and down and back and forth in a diff and all the related interfaces and abstract classes and implementations to understand what effect the delta is having on the program as a whole.