[llvm-dev] Debuggability of -O1 level

[via llvm-dev]

(Remembering to +llvm-dev this time…)

There has been some progress in the direction of improving debuggability of optimized code, in the past year.  There have been a number of patches to improve tracking of debug info in various passes, and some more general improvements such as work on the LiveDebugValues pass.  I don't think anyone has done a specific analysis to identify passes that lose debug info.
However, various people/teams have an interest in making improvements here, and continue to devote some resources to the longer term project.  For example there is the Extend Lifetimes work described by Wolfgang Pieb at the 2017 LLVM Developers Meeting.  We have also looked into how the instruction scheduler might be interfering with the debugging experience.
Part of the problem is that the "debugging experience" is a fairly qualitative thing, but in order to attack the problem properly we need a more analytic quantitative measure of how we are doing, which will hopefully lead us to areas where things can improve.  See for example the DIVA tool, described at the 2017 EuroLLVM.  Sony also has some other internal tools, which I hope we can describe at future meetings and make available to the community.

In short, there is continued interest and (more importantly) effort towards both –Og in particular and improving the debugging of optimized code in general.  I am hopeful that we can eventually reach a point where we can define an –Og that is as debuggable as –O0 while still having distinctly better runtime performance.  Whether –Og becomes its own thing, or ends up as a redefinition of –O1, remains to be decided.

Thanks for your interest, and giving me a reason to write up this little summary.  And if you are motivated to help with the project, that's great!
--paulr



From: llvm-dev [mailto:llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org] On Behalf Of Son Tuan VU via llvm-dev
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2018 7:35 AM
To: llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Subject: [llvm-dev] Debuggability of -O1 level

Hello all,

I've found an old post (November 2016) http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-November/107006.html which discussed debug information for optimized code. At the end of that discussion, Adrian broached the interest in making -O1 only enable optimizations. I see in the code (clang/lib/Frontend/CompilerInvocation.cpp, in function getOptimizationLevel) that -Og option is equivalent to -O1. Does this mean any progress on making -O1 the GCC's -Og? If not, would someone kindly tell me what is holding the debuggability at -O1 back? Which optimization passes are removing our debug info at this -O1 level?

Thank you for your help,

Son Tuan Vu
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