"No pointers, no cry" was worth the price of admission. There are features and benefits here that seem magical. I may be misunderstanding, but does this mean that you could compile directly into containers like podman? That is, is the NIR parse able as a container image?
A container image is essentially a generalization of a binary, a folder holding the binary to run with its dependencies in a format that docker/podman can read, unpack/uncompress, mount the folder and thereby its contained dependencies and binary, sets up unix accounting, and run the binary with its support dependencies.
A compiler intermediate representation looks like a collection of data structures that can be used to generate runnable code either immediately as in an interpreter or saved for later use.
