[LLVMdev] How to represent __attribute__((fastcall)) functions in the IL

[Daniel Dunbar]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 10:37 AM, Renato Golin <rengolin at systemcall.org> wrote:
>> On 19 October 2012 17:00, Duncan Sands <baldrick at free.fr> wrote:
>>> That said, I also don't like the idea of filling the IR with tons of target
>>> specific stuff.
>>
>> In this case, I think it's even worse than "aapcs" or "fastcall", that
>> are target dependent, but at a higher level.
>>
>> Proposing at which register each variable will be, forces the
>> front-ends to know all about all targets LLVM supports (the register
>> names for x86_64 will be different than for x86, which will be
>> different than ARM, Thumb, MIPS, etc). Which is not just a
>> language/ABI issue, but hardware architecture one.
>
> I don't really disagree with anyone who finds this a bit distasteful,
> but understand that we are already in an even worse situation.
>
> The frontend must in fact reason in extreme detail about the targets
> that LLVM supports, and these frontends already have the exact
> register positioning (if not naming) encoded in them.
>
> In addition, frontends must currently reason about exactly how each
> target in LLVM will choose to lower various arguments and return
> values of various types, and try to conjure up an LLVM type and
> parameter distribution which each target will lower into the exact
> registers which are mandated by the ABI for that target.
>
> So the situation today is that frontends have all of this
> target-specific information *and* there is an implicit, unspecified
> contract between the frontend, LLVM's IR, and each target backend
> about exactly how the lowering through these will occur in order to
> ensure that the actual code generated matches the ABI requirements the
> frontend is trying to encode. :: sigh ::
>
>
> While in theory, I would love it if the frontends could be unaware of
> such details, it seems impractical. The ABI is really tho combination
> of language and target, whether we like it or not. I think we just
> need a model for explicitly describing the required lowering, and
> hopefully in a way orthogonal to the LLVM IR type system so that we
> don't have to waste large amounts of IR complexity on shoving bits
> into and out of peculiar IR types.
>
> Unfortunately, I have no such concrete design in mind, and I certainly
> still think that the onstack thing is a step in the right direction.

+1

This is a good description of the situation. Adding more information
to the IR is just making the current use of an implicit contract
explicit. At the same time, the addition of this contract should give
the frontend much more leverage to be explicit and get the right ABI
without abusing the IR. In practice, that could result in across the
board wins for compile time and for execution time in the cases our
abusive IR doesn't get optimized well.

The other piece of this is that currently the mid-level optimizers are
really inhibited as far as what they can do to rewrite function calls
arguments. Allowing things to be more explicit in the IR would go some
ways towards allowing the mid-level optimizers to rewrite function
arguments without changing the ABI.

 - Daniel

>
> -Chandler
>
>>
>> Having the PCSBuilder / PCS pass, would decouple the front-end of the
>> back-end, at least on PCS matters.
>>
>> However, I agree with you that we should not have function signatures
>> that are different than their calls.
>>
>> --
>> cheers,
>> --renato
>>
>> http://systemcall.org/
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