“I want students to feel the pain of working with non-SSA programs before the course introduces SSA. This frustration can help motivate why SSA is the modern consensus.”
Here is a follow-up quote from the article.
> Unfortunately, this aftermarket SSA retrofit has been a huge headache. [...] I think my original design is fundamentally flawed; it was a mistake to treat phi semantically as “just another instruction” [...]. Bril’s SSA form needs a full rework [...]. It has been an interesting lesson for me that SSA comes with subtle design implications that are difficult to retrofit onto an existing mutation-oriented IL.
I don't know enough to know what to make of this and the accompanying bug reports. Perhaps just "stay away from Bril SSA"?