[PATCH] D36432: [IPSCCP] Add function specialization ability

[Davide Italiano via Phabricator via llvm-commits]

davide added a comment.

Very neat work, thanks, this was in my todolist for a while :)
Some meta comments, I'll try to find some time to review this more carefully this week.

I wonder if we're at a point where it makes sense to split the lattice solver from the transforms, as with your partial specialization code SCCP is growing a lot :)
This would have also a bunch of other advantages, e.g. we could more easily try to plug arbitrary lattices (for example for variables/ranges/bits).
IIRC Chris Lattner started a propagation enging a while ago, it should still be in tree, but unused.  What are your thoughts?

That said, the approach I had in mind (as mentioned on llvm-dev) was that of:

1. implementing "real" jump functions for IPSCCP. To the best of my understanding complicated jump functions never got traction (so, e.g. GCC implements only constant and passthrough).
2. Propagate the information down the DAG of SCC (of the callgraph). From what I can see your approach is instead iterative so everytime you specialize something, you do another round of solving. I'm not sure whether this converges more slowly, or if it matters in practice, probably worth taking some numbers.

I think your heuristic is on the right track (it's the same one I used in an early prototype), but it would be nice to collect numbers to tune it further.

I'm a little bit reluctant about having this enabled by default (in the beginning)a s unfortunately cloning can have catastrophic consequences (I had a chat with the GCC folks where they reported substantial growth in the executable sizes for large programs without real speedups, and I also had an early prototype that confirmed this thesis).

Thanks again for working on this!


https://reviews.llvm.org/D36432