[LLVMdev] Is there a "callback optimization"?

[Kenneth Uildriks]

When I used -std-compile-opts -disable-inlining, my transform didn't
happen.  I think in your test, the inline of UseCallback into foo
automatically made the function pointer into a constant, which turned
it into a direct call that was then inlined.

If UseCallback is too big to inline and uses the callback parameter
inside a loop, this transform is potentially valuable, particularly if
UseCallback is called multiple times with the same callback parameter.

Interestingly, when I had foo call UseCallback multiple times with
*only* callback1, it yanked the function pointer parameter out of
UseCallback and turned the thing into a direct call.  (I'm guessing
dead argument elimination came into play here)  But as soon as I added
a call to UseCallback with callback2 to the mix, it went back to not
making any indirect call elimination.

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 11:11 AM, Duncan Sands <baldrick at free.fr> wrote:
> Hi Kenneth,
>
>> By that I mean an optimization pass (or a combination of them) that turns:
> ...
>> With that transform in place, lots of inlining becomes possible, and
>> direct function calls replace indirect function calls if inlining
>> isn't appropriate.  If this transform is combined with argpromotion
>> and scalarrepl, it can be used for devirtualization of C++ virtual
>> function calls.
>>
>> There seems to be an awful lot of C++ code out there that uses
>> templates to perform this same optimization in source code.
>
> yes, LLVM does this.  For example, running your example through the LLVM
> optimizers gives:
>
> define void @foo() nounwind readnone {
> entry:
>   ret void
> }
>
> As you can see, the indirect function calls were resolved into direct
> function calls and inlined.
>
> I don't know which passes take care of this however.
>
> Ciao,
>
> Duncan.
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