[LLVMdev] flag_unit_at_a_time and pass scheduling in llvm-gcc

[Devang Patel]

On Apr 15, 2008, at 11:49 PM, Duncan Sands wrote:

> As far as I can see flag_unit_at_a_time
> is used to control whether inter-procedural/whole-module passes are  
> scheduled.


You can do inlining even when flag_unit_at_a_time is off. And one can  
enable unit-at-a-time without enabling any optimizations.  The unit-at- 
a-time is not meant to select optimization passes, though it may  
influence selection.

Originally, this flag instructs gcc to parse entire source file before  
producing code. I am told that originally gcc worked on one statement  
at a time (stmt->parse->optimize->codegen->next-stmt). Later on it was  
enhanced to work on a function at a time. Next logical step was to  
work on a source file at a time. IIRC, the flag was required because  
some of the lang. FE produced parsed trees caused huge amount of  
memory pressure during code generation making unit-at-a-time not  
suitable for all languages.

-
Devang