[LLVMdev] Define an instruction with many operands

[Chris Lattner]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, Tzu-Chien Chiu wrote:
> If I have an instruction which has many register and immediate
> operands, what's the difference between these two implementations to
> define the instruction in TableGen *.td file?

There isn't a big difference.  The MachineInstr objects used to 
dynamically represent these instructions will have to have the number of 
operands specified in either case.  It is largely a representational issue 
in the .td file.  That said, you should only use this grouping if they are 
logically related to each other.  Future improvements to the code 
generator will cause these things to be basically "glued together tree 
patterns".  In the X86 example, we might have something like this (very 
psuedo code just to give the idea:

   def RRIaddr : Operand<(add R32, (add R32, imm32))>;
   def R4RIaddr : Operand<(add R32, (shl R32, 2))>;
   def AddrModes :    RRIaddr or R4RIaddr;

This would allow us to write something like this:

def AND8rm   : I<0x22, MRMSrcMem,
                  (ops R8 :$dst, R8 :$src1, i8mem :$src2),
                  "and{b} {$src2, $dst|$dst, $src2}",
                  (set R8:$dst, (and R8:$src1, AddrMode:$src2)) >;

The last line is the new one for AND8rm, which would basically say that 
the pattern it matches are the specified one with any of the "AddrMode" 
patterns glued into it.

If your instructions fit into this sort of flavor, it makes sense to use 
operands like the X86 backend does.   If not, probably not.

-Chris



> (1) Similar to what has been done to complex X86 addressing mode. A
> single 32-bit immediate (i32) encodes how to add many MachineOperands
> to the MachineInstr object (With the help of functions in
> X86InstrBuilder.h).
>
> // similar to X86MemOperand in X86InstrInfo.td !!
> class ManyOperands : Operand<i32> {
>  let NumMIOperands = 100;  // a very large number
>  let PrintMethod = "printManyOperands";
> }
> def MO : ManyOperands;
> def FOOBAR: Instruction<(ops MO:$operands), "foobar {$operands}">;
>
>
> (2) 'Collapse' all operands in .td file. Contrary to method (1), each
> operand is explicitly specified.
>
> def FOOBAR: Instruction<(ops R32:$src0, R16:$src1, ... ), "foobar
> $src0, $src1, ...">;
>
> The operand list could be very long.
>
>

-Chris

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