[LLVMdev] pragmas

[Torvald Riegel]

On Wednesday 01 April 2009 20:01:09 Dan Gohman wrote:
> On Apr 1, 2009, at 7:25 AM, Torvald Riegel wrote:
> > On Wednesday 25 March 2009, Luke Dalessandro wrote:
> >> You could encode this information as simple library function calls
> >> and
> >> then find them again in the generated LLVM IR. The client then 
just
> >> needs a header declaring the functions and information on what 
they
> >> mean. Since there are never any definitions of them they won't 
end up
> >> going anywhere.
> >
> > I've been using this approach now for almost two years in a project
> > and it
> > _seems_ to work fine. However, I'd like to get some feedback from
> > the experts
> > on which kinds of code could be moved by the standard passes over
> > the points
> > in code marked by such calls.
> > For me, loads, stores, and calls to other functions are most
> > interesting. Do
> > the current optimization passes do that? (For example, by checking
> > whether a
> > global's address would escape to external entities like the dummy
> > function
> > that is the marker and allowing accesses to the global to be moved
> > if it
> > doesn't escape.)
>
> Yes, there are current optimizations which do things like this.  Global
> variables are implicitly escaping, because they can be referenced by
> name, but in other cases LLVM does determine variables that don't
> escape and performs optimizations accordingly.

Can you tell me more about "the other cases", or categorize them in 
some way? For example, does this apply to thread-local variables only 
(which would be okay in my case), or do LLVM passes also check whether 
arbitrary pointers (eg, passed in via function arguments) escape?

Thanks,
Torvald