patch: mark all possible tail calls as "tail"

[Hal Finkel]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nick Lewycky" <nlewycky at google.com>
> To: "Commit Messages and Patches for LLVM" <llvm-commits at cs.uiuc.edu>
> Sent: Saturday, May 3, 2014 1:17:43 AM
> Subject: patch: mark all possible tail calls as "tail"
> 
> 
> 
> I observed that LLVM fails to mark "tail" on some simple cases. In
> particular it seems that there is only one pass which does it,
> TailRecursionElimination, and TRE will skip the entire function if
> any call argument is derived from an alloca or byval argument.
> 
> 
> 
> I've implemented a patch which does the full expensive analysis: look
> at every instruction, make note of allocas and byval arguments and

Just to be clear, the desire here is to prevent alloca-derived addresses from making it into tail-called functions, right? I took a quick look at the patch, but I don't see what happens if an alloca-derived address is stored into a global variable. In that case, the function could obviously still get it. Can you explain what happens in this case?

Thanks again,
Hal

> all values which are potentially derived from those, and then mark
> calls which never get those as input tail, and calls which get
> alloca-derived values and could write them into memory "poison" all
> non-readnone functions which are reachable after they run. This is
> surely O(n^2) with an expensive "isPotentiallyReachable" call at
> every step, but I didn't notice any slowdown without any
> instruments.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Roughly 80,000 additional calls are marked tail in a bootstrap of
> clang. Sadly this doesn't correlate to actual "jmp" instructions due
> to what appear to be further optimizer deficiencies.
> 
> 
> I have attached my patch for review. Are there ways this could be
> done more efficiently? Are there places we're redoing work that
> could be shared? What is a sensible set of limits on it that will
> prevent runaway optimizer time? Should it be part of TRE or moved to
> a separate pass? Land it as-is and we'll find out what breaks later?
> 
> 
> Nick
> 
> 
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-- 
Hal Finkel
Assistant Computational Scientist
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory