[LLVMdev] Newbie Question: not using local variables

[Ben Karel]

Hello Brian,

There is actually one potential downside to using only LLVM registers: it
will (at the moment) prevent you from using any sort of moving garbage
collector (copying, compacting, or generational) for your language. The
reason is that LLVM's garbage collection infrastructure does not (yet)
compute register maps, only stack maps, and thus does not automatically
re-load potentially moved pointers after safe points.

Also, IIRC debug metadata must be attached to stack slots.

But these issues are not worth worrying about yet. Do the simple, clear, and
obvious thing first, then change tack if it proves to be insufficient for
your needs.

Have fun!
-- Ben

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Brian Hurt <bhurt at spnz.org> wrote:

>
> I'm writing an ML-like language, and using LLVM as my target back end.  I
> have one question though, and thought I'd throw it out onto the list.  In
> my language, variables aren't mutable- once assigned, they can be
> shadowed, but not changed.  And shadowing of variables is handled by
> alpha-renaming.  What I mean by this that when I see:
>        let x = 3 in ...
> the value of x can not be changed.  It can be shadowed, like:
>        let x = f () in
>        let x = x + 4 in
>        ...
> but one of the first things I do is rename all the variables so they're
> unique, so the above code might get changed into:
>        let x_5734 = f () in
>        let x_8643 = x_5734 + 4 in
>        ...
>
> Now, my question is this: is there any downside to not having any
> stack-based local variables at all- just put everything into registers and
> let the register allocation code decide what needs to get spilled onto the
> stack?  In other words, is there any problem with generating the following
> IR for the above code:
>        %r17 = call i64 @f(i64 0)
>        %r18 = add i64 %r17 4
>
> The upside of doing this is simpler code generation, and hopefully more
> efficient code, as I am explicitly telling the optimizer I don't care
> where this variable lives.
>
> But, I'm somewhat worried that by not having any local variables at all,
> this may put too much pressure on the register allocator (especially for
> large functions).  Also, how to attach debugging information to a register
> is something I need to figure out.
>
> Thoughts?  Opinions?  Is this a good way to proceed, or a bad way?
>
> Brian
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