It's used to implement `InstructionSet` and `ValueSet`: sets of SILValues and SILInstructions.
Just like `BasicBlockSet` for basic blocks, the set is implemented by setting bits directly in SILNode.
This is super efficient because insertion and deletion to/from the set are basic bit operations.
The cost is an additional word in SILNode. But this is basically negligible: it just adds ~0.7% of memory used for SILInstructions.
In my experiments, I didn't see any relevant changes in memory consumption or compile time.
... with a fix for a non-assert build crash: I used the wrong ilist type for SlabList. This does not explain the crash, though. What I think happened here is that llvm miscompiled and put the llvm_unreachable from the Slab's deleteNode function unconditionally into the SILModule destructor.
Now by using simple_ilist, there is no need for a deleteNode at all.