[cfe-dev] [RFC] automatic variable initialization

[David Blaikie via cfe-dev]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 3:17 PM Kostya Serebryany <kcc at google.com> wrote:

>
>>>> Seems easier to me to separate the two pieces - move ahead with the
>>>> non-zero options, and separate the discussion on the zero option. You can
>>>> present performance numbers from what you can measure without shipping a
>>>> compiler with the feature - and if those numbers are sufficiently
>>>> compelling compared to the risks of slicing the language, then perhaps we
>>>> go that way.
>>>>
>>>
>>> This approach will significantly impair my ability to do the
>>> measurements I need.
>>>
>>
>> I'm aware waht I'm proposing would make it more difficult for some people
>> to take measurements - that's a tradeoff to be sure - one where I err in
>> this direction.
>>
>> Specifically for Google though - would it be that difficult for Google to
>> opt-in to a certain build configuration of LLVM?
>>
>
> Absolutely yes.
> Google is not just a single monolithic code base
> <http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2860000/2854146/p78-potvin.pdf?ip=104.133.8.94&id=2854146&acc=OA&key=4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E5945DC2EABF3343C&__acm__=1543446999_3aadcd36f657e2297430c38bee93f16c>
> .
>

Couldn't access this link ("An error occurred while processing your
request" - but yeah, I understand there's a bunch of different pieces of
Google beyond the "stuff that runs in data centers" piece we mostly support.


> Besides that monolithic thing, we have Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Fuchsia,
> and a bazillion of smaller efforts that use their own toolchains.
>

Still, most/all of these build their own compilers, I think? But yeah, that
adds an opt-in overhead to each project, for sure.


> In some cases the most reliable and complete way of measuring performance
> changes is to submit the changes to revision control,
> and let the performance bots shew it for a couple of days. That's how we
> iterated with the LLVM's CFI in Chrome.
> We will also need to work with the upstream Linux kernel -- it's hard
> enough for them to use clang and a modified clang will cost us much more
> effort.
>

Yeah, I can imagine that one's a bit trickier - how's performance
evaluation of the kernel done? (though, again, I imagine a fair amount of
progress could be made without the zero-init feature - perhaps enough to
say "hey, here are all the places we have run tests & seen the performance
tradeoff is worthwhile for us (& possibly that it's close to the zero-init
case, but that's sort of orthogonal, imho - that it's worthwhile is the
main thing) - perhaps other folks would be willing to test it (non-zero
init) & see if it's worthwhile to them - and if it isn't/they're interested
in more performance, maybe all that evidence we can gain from the places
where it's easy for us to rebuild compilers, etc, would make it interesting
enough to motivate someone to do build the kernel with a custom compiler &
do some performance measurements, etc...

Sorry that was a bit rambly, anyway.

- Dave


>
>
>
>
>> We/Google do build the compiler from scratch, I assume we pick the
>> configuration options we build with & some of them probably aren't the
>> defaults for a release build of LLVM. So if it was important that Google's
>> production compiler had these features enabled (rather than building a test
>> compiler for running some experiments), that doesn't seem (at least to me,
>> at this moment) especially prohibitive, is it?
>>
>>
>
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