Chris, you are so generous for explaining this stuff, thank you.
Quick question about #2 that I may not be picking up on, but how is it possible to avoid generating the "TON of IR" in the first place? (I'd live with a link to further reading if you're unable to go into details). Thanks!
[Not him of course] — My understanding is that instead of generating a ton of (LLVM) IR, you generate a little (MLIR) IR, because MLIR lets you define operations at higher levels of abstraction, suited to particular tasks. For instance, if you're doing loop optimizations, instead of crawling through a sea of compare and branch and arithmetic operations, you'd just use a higher-level ‘for’ operation¹. Only after you've done everything you can at the high level do you move down to a more concrete representation, so you hope to end up with both less LLVM IR and less work to do on it.
Quick question about #2 that I may not be picking up on, but how is it possible to avoid generating the "TON of IR" in the first place? (I'd live with a link to further reading if you're unable to go into details). Thanks!