[LLVMdev] [PATCH] Support asm comment output

[David Greene]

On Monday 13 July 2009 11:40, Chris Lattner wrote:

> > I was attempting to reduce the number of files affected, but if you
> > want this change I'll go ahead and do it.
>
> Makes sense, thanks.  Please do it as a separate patch from the other
> changes though since it will be large and mechanical.

Ok, no problem.

> > - Tag instructons with source line information (customers really
> > want this).
>
> Right, that would be nice.  This should be synthesizable from the
> DebugLoc on the instruction in the asm printer, no need to redundantly
> encode it into the comment field.

Except the DebugLoc stuff isn't all there yet AFAIK.  We've been using the
comment mechanism for over a year.  I agree we should move to synthesizing 
it from DebugLoc when it's ready.

We're not going to submit our line number stuff anyway (it's too much of a
hack) but we would like the comment infrastructure to be there.

> > - Tag instructions as register spills or reloads.
>
> I'm not sure what this means exactly, but would it be sufficient for
> the asmprinter to use isLoadFromStackSlot and print this if the FI is
> a spill slot?

Maybe.  I'm not sure what information is available here.  The other thing
this code does is tag it as a vector or scalar spill/reload.  Synthesizing
that might be trickier as you have to take the opcode into account.  It's a
lot of work, at the very least.

> > - Tag instructions with an ID of the tblgen pattern that generated
> > them.  This
> >  is super useful for debugging.
>
> this would also be really nice :).  This can be generated by the asm
> printer as well.

How so?  Where is the pattern information available?

> > - Tag instructions as top-of-loop, with nesting information (we use
> > this
> >  to do some static analysis on asm files).
>
> What part of the code generator would identify this?  It seems that
> the asmprinter could do this, but it is less obvious than the former
> ones.  It also seems that this is really a basic block property, not
> an instruction property.

Yes, we tag basic blocks.  That patch is coming later.  I added a pass
that explicitly examines loop information and adds the appropriate comments.
So this could be synthesized on-the-fly, I think.

> If these are the planned uses of the comments, it would be nice try to
> not add a per-machine-instr list of comments.  Instead, the asmprinter
> could synthesize the list as it processes each instruction.  This
> makes the list of comments transient instead of persistent in the
> machineinstrs.  Does that sound reasonable to you?

I still don't know how to synthesize tblgen pattern information in the 
asmprinter.  Except line numbers, which we need today.  Maybe all of the other 
current stuff can be synthesized.  I don't know what might come down the road, 
though.

What's the plan for meta-information?  Could comments go there when it's 
ready?  Would it be ok to add these for now and remove them as other 
mechanisms (DebugLoc, meta-information) come on-line?

                                -Dave