> That is, we are introducing a new intermediate representation (IR) of your program that we call MIR: MIR stands for mid-level IR, because the MIR comes between the existing HIR ("high-level IR", roughly an abstract syntax tree) and LLVM (the "low-level" IR).

It's so terribly confusing because LLVM itself defines a .mir (Machine IR) that is a syntax between its IR and the backend (which could be thought of as mid-level IR). When I heard about Rust's MIR, I assumed it was some clever way to generate target-dependent IR.

The good news is that we now have M(L)IR: the one IR to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.