This is what I originally thought, but I'm having slight second thoughts now. The thing is that the tradeoff is now you need a new IR for every bytecode language you have, which in our case means at least sm1, sm4, and eventually I think sm6. That's a lot of extra support code to add. Consider how much we'd need to add by putting that intermediate step into HLSL -> smX translation. The advantage of making v_s_i the IR is that you don't actually need any of that.
You mean that you'd have just `v_s_i` and every frontend and backend deals directly with it, including for very syntactical things like assembling and disassembling? I don't feel really convinced, it seems to me that you'd have to encode su much stuff in `v_s_i` that each time you need to change something (for example to allow for a new language) the changes can have repercussions in each other language frontend or backend.
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Giovanni Mascellani (＠giomasce)