[PATCH] D36553: [InstCombine] Add a DEBUG_COUNTER to InstCombine to limit how many instructions are visited for debug

[Daniel Berlin via Phabricator via llvm-commits]

dberlin added a comment.

> The debug counter infrastructure also supports skipping some number of calls at the beginning as well, but that feels like it would generate very odd behavior with InstCombine.



> 

FWIW: I think i would say that when it can be done reasonably, it can help a lot on large files. But it is definitely difficult, as we implement some optimizations, to have it work in a fashion that makes a ton of sense to think about.  IE it's easy if the optimization just has candidates that it processes once.

For NewGVN, we go to the trouble of marking things such that it acts like a candidate counter (
IE if we skip value numbering A the first time, we'll always skip it) , because it can help us a lot to narrow down the space of stuff getting value numbered, and in some cases, reduce testcases to value numbering a single def-use chain.

All that said, since the goal is faster reduction and debugging, sometimes not thinking about it works too. Most optimization should *not* crash or break just because you decide not to optimize the first n instructions or whatever.
In this case,   InstCombine shouldn't crash or break just because we randomly decide not to optimize the first N things on the worklist.


https://reviews.llvm.org/D36553