[cfe-dev] CLang and ISO C math functions

[Hal Finkel via cfe-dev]

----- Original Message -----

> From: "Martin J. O'Riordan" <martin.oriordan at movidius.com>
> To: "Hal Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>
> Cc: "Clang Dev" <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>
> Sent: Thursday, September 1, 2016 3:07:36 AM
> Subject: RE: [cfe-dev] CLang and ISO C math functions

> Thanks Hal,

> From: Hal Finkel [mailto:hfinkel at anl.gov]
> Sent: 01 September 2016 01:48

> > I would expect this behaviour if ‘ -ffast-math -fno-math-errno ’
> > was
> > selected, but it isn’t, and I think that this is an invalid
> > optimisation. It also means that some of my math functional tests
> > are not reporting honestly (this only happens when the argument(s)
> > are constants). Also, on our architecture, ‘ double ’ is FP32,
> 
> Does Clang for your target emit C-language "double" types as "double"
> at the IR level? If so, that's wrong. "double" at the IR level is
> assumed to be an IEEE double-precision number. All of the constant
> folding will do the wrong thing on your target if this is what is
> happening.

> No, I have:

> DoubleFormat = &llvm::APFloat::IEEEsingle;

> set in my ‘ TargetInfo ’, and the IR shows ‘ f32 ’.
Okay, that sounds good. 

> But it is the elision of the tests when I am not using ‘ -ffast-math
> ’ that I think is wrong, the tests are not present; I’m quite happy
> with this behaviour when ‘ -ffast-math ’ is used. In the ‘ foo ’
> example the calls to ‘ foo ’ are retained and the tests are present;
> it is only when I rename ‘ foo ’ to ‘ exp ’ or some other math
> function that this happens.

> With ‘ -fno-math-errno ’ it can be assumed that the math functions
> have no other side-effects, and in combination with ‘ -ffast-math ’
> the reduction to the optimal ‘ return 0 ’ is perfect. But neither of
> these options are selected.

> I downloaded the official v3.8.0 distribution for X86 from the LLVM
> website and tried that, and got the same behaviour, it’s not
> particular to my out-of-tree changes. With v3.9.0 RC3 the calls to
> the math functions are no longer elided, but the tests still are.

> > and it is probable that the compiler is using the host platform’s
> > implementation which is FP64 for evaluating the test expressions,
> 
> Yes, that's right. See ConstantFoldScalarCall in LLVM's
> lib/Analysis/ConstantFolding.cpp. We're obviously aware this can
> cause issues when cross compiling. If you'd like to discuss this
> behavior, you should do so on llvm-dev. We might want to make this
> more configurable than it currently is.

> I don’t have any issue with the constant-folding, just the elision of
> the tests. I assume that the special handling of the C math
> functions is happening in CLang rather than LLVM, but I don’t
> generally look much at the semantic analysis code so I am not as
> familiar with it. If the math library semantic issues are LLVM then
> I should post this on LLVM-Dev, but I think that this is more likely
> front-end issue - no?
As James said in his reply, you might be looking for -fno-builtin here. Aside from that, however, all of these optimizations are in LLVM, not in Clang. Standard C library functions are recognized by name in the backend (unless Clang tags then with the 'nobuiltin' attribute). 

-Hal 

> MartinO

-- 

Hal Finkel 
Assistant Computational Scientist 
Leadership Computing Facility 
Argonne National Laboratory 
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