That's quite dismissive. What exactly "is possible today" and why aren't these top compilers using them?
E-graphs ameliorate phase ordering issues and allow for exploring the space of non-monotonic rewrites; recent research makes them computationally viable.
Put simply: it's legacy. Gcc and llvm are millions of lines of code, and they assume a particular architecture. Changing that is not easy.
Another issue, which I did not mention (but which is pertinent) is that c is a poor language for compilation. (Fran allen famously said 'c has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art'.) In some respects, the optimisations performed automatically by modern high-performance cpus are more sophisticated than those done by c compilers, howbeit with less reach; the only reason they are able to do this is that they have direct control of the execution and hence have a greater ability to abstract over the side effects which are rampant in most c code.
Your example touches on the problems of inflexible ABI, namely caller saved registers and the unknowability of side effects of external functions. Very weird that it can't reorder `r = x+y` despite it having no "observable" side effect until `return r`, since that return dominates the assignment, and there's no real relation between (the return, assignment) and (eff()).
My example has nothing whatsoever to do with abi, and everything to do with ir. f and g are exactly semantically equivalent, and this equivalence is trivial to show; that the compilers generate different code for each demonstrates redundancies in their ir.
> it is a side effect to assign to a variable
But that variable is not aliased here.
