[LLVMdev] Early-clobber constraint in TableGen

[Jim Grosbach]

On Dec 15, 2009, at 5:08 PM, David Greene wrote:

> On Tuesday 15 December 2009 18:01, Jim Grosbach wrote:
>
>> For a usage example, I've included in the patch the modification to
>> use the constraint for the STREX ARM instruction.
>
> Your example is:
>
> constraints = "@early $success"
>
> Why not spell it as:
>
> constraints = "$success != $src", "$success != $ptr"
>

This was my first thought as well; however, I decided against it. I  
think it's best, at least for now, to expose an  interface in tablegen  
to express the early-clobber semantics that the back-end already  
supports rather than adding something completely new.

Doing more would require significantly surgery on both tablegen and  
the register allocation framework to support. The handling of early- 
clobber register definitions is already in place in the allocator, and  
this approach simply provides a means of specifying it in the tablegen  
files. I think that's likely something we'd want separately from a  
more general purpose solution in any case, as it's analogous to the  
inline assembler '&' constraint, for example.

Do you have specific examples in mind that would be expressible with  
something more complicated that aren't handleable via an early-clobber  
constraint?

> The grammar would change to something like:
>
> constraint: operand '!=' operand
>  | operand '=' operand
>
> This seems more intuitive and more generally applicable.  I could  
> see a use
> for this in other architectures.  From reading your example, without  
> the
> background I wouldn't know what "@early" means.

Perhaps spelling it out more fully with "earlyclobber" rather than  
"early" would help?

Thanks for the feedback!

-Jim
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