Solidity developers have long dreaded the infamous “Stack too deep” error. To work around it, they often split functions, pack variables into structs, or manually offload values to memory — just to get the code to compile. It’s been a persistent pain point, with prominent Ethereum engineers openly questioning why it remains unresolved. One partial solution is the --via-ir flag, which allows the compiler to automatically move excess variables to memory instead of relying solely on DUP and SWAP for stack manipulation. It mostly works — but with a major caveat: it can subtly change the semantics of a contract. The result? Most projects remain on the legacy compiler path, doing “stack too deep” workarounds, leaving the underlying problem unsolved.