Apologies for the noob question, but what is an IR?

intermediate representation. attempting to analyze zig code directly would be too hard (especially with comptime). on the way to the compiler backend, the compiler builds a simplified representation that only has "actually existing functions" and is very straightforward, e.g.

    function 10112:
    0: argument 0
    1: argument 1
    2: argument 2
    3: add 0, 1
    4: store 2
    5: call function 1342, (2, 4)
    6: return 5