Is Cranelift basically a LLVM but in Rust?
We also have an explicit focus on correctness, simplicity, and verification. One could argue that in practice LLVM is used everywhere and has dozens of active core contributors, that bugs and missed optimizations are shallow at that scale, and it's hard to compete with that; and there is some merit in that... but our codebase is two orders of magnitude smaller, and we're actively engaging with academics and designing things -- our lowering DSL, our regalloc's symbolic verifier, our fuzzing-first approach -- to get the most mileage we can out of our efforts. It seems to be working OK so far!
[0] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/crane...
Does this mean Cranelift has a clearer view of what its IR really means than, say, LLVM? It seems to me that being very clear-eyed on this will be important as C and C++ get ready to bite the bullet (perhaps this decade) and formally document how pointer provenance works in their languages, and perhaps Aria's provenance "experiment" in Rust begins the journey to stabilisation.
I'm not super-familiar with the pointer provenance work in Rust but I'll read more about this; thanks for the mention!