[LLVMdev] InstructionSelectBasicBlock question

[Chris Lattner]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2006, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> I have two questions about the above method of the SelectionDAGISel class.
>
> 1. The overrides in PPCDAGToDAGISel and in I64DAGToDAGISel are identical
> (except for  PPCISD::FIRST_NUMBER vs. IA64ISD::FIRST_NUMBER).
> Maybe, this means that it would be better if SelectionDAGISel had default
> implementation? That would remove this code duplication.

Yup, that would be great.

> 2. What are possible reasons for *not* using the default implementation? X86
> has completely different code, why?

There are three different cases here:

1. In Sparc, we see simple and logical code to select a block.
2. In X86, it needs to do extra work to deal with the FP stack stuff
    after doing #1.  This work is target-specific and shouldn't be needed
    by any other target.
3. In the case of PPC/Itanium, the code is *functionally* identical to #1,
    but includes some hacks that are designed to reduce the stack space
    usage of the instruction selector (darwin/ppc defaults to a really tiny
    stack, so these hacks are worthwhile.  The IA64 presumably copied the
    implementation from the PPC backend).

To me, I think it would make sense to move the implementation in the PPC 
backend up to the SelectionDAGISel class.  The stack space reducing hacks 
can benefit all targets, and the algorithm is the same for all (like you 
said, except for the enum).  The X86 backend can override it, explicitly 
call the superclass, then do the magic it wants.

Would you be interested in working on this?

-Chris

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