[cfe-dev] MLIR for clang

[Hal Finkel via cfe-dev]

Hi, Prashanth,

I definitely recommend that we have a discussion first on design goals 
for this. You've mentioned modeling of multidimensional arrays, and I 
know you've also been thinking about OpenMP, and it would be good to lay 
out the desired end state.

Part of the reason I say this is because there are significant design 
decisions that I suspect will appear up front. Handling of 
multidimensional arrays is a good example. C/C++ certainly do have 
multidimensional arrays of static extent, but these are largely 
irrelevant for a significant fraction of production C++ use cases. This 
is because, in many cases, the array bounds are not known statically, or 
at least they're not all known statically, and so programmers make use 
of C++ wrapper libraries which provide the interface of multidimensional 
arrays implemented on top of one-dimensional heap-allocated data. If we 
create an infrastructure that works well for static multidimensional 
arrays but does not contain any provision for recognizing appropriate 
loop nests and also treating them using the multidimensional-array 
optimization infrastructure, we won't really improve the compiler in 
practice for many, if not most, relevant production users.

It's also going to be important what we optimize loops that only look 
like loops after coroutines are analyzed and inlined. Regardless, there 
certainly are areas in which we could do a better job optimizing 
constructs  (e.g., more devirtualization, optimization of exception 
handling and uses of RTTI), and it would be good to put everything out 
on the table so that decisions can be made based on use cases as opposed 
to being driven by the desire to use a particular tool.

Thanks again,

Hal

On 2/16/20 3:21 AM, Prashanth N R via cfe-dev wrote:
> +cfe-dev
>
> On Sun, Feb 16, 2020 at 2:46 PM Prashanth N R <prashanth.nr at gmail.com 
> <mailto:prashanth.nr at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>       Starting from May-June, we at "Compiler Tree" would  start
>     porting clang compiler to use MLIR as middle end target. If
>     someone has already started a similar effort we would love to
>     collaborate with them. If someone would like to work with us, we
>     are ready to form a group and collaborate. If there are sharing
>     opportunities from Fortran side, we would like to consider the same.
>
>        We are in the early phase of design for "C" part of the work.
>     From our experience with (FC+MLIR) compiler, we are estimating
>     that we would have an early cut of the compiler working with
>     non-trivial workload within a quarter of starting of work.
>
>       Please ping me for any queries or concerns.
>
>     Regards,
>     -Prashanth
>
>
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-- 
Hal Finkel
Lead, Compiler Technology and Programming Languages
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory

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