[LLVMdev] FunctionPass question

[Redmond, Paul]

Hi Duncan,

On 2013-01-24, at 4:23 PM, Duncan Sands wrote:

> Hi Paul,
> 
>> I am working on a pass to convert lib calls to intrinsic calls as discussed here: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2013-January/058507.html
> 
> this whole area is a little confusing.  If you can recognize a libcall as
> being equivalent to an intrinsic, you could indeed turn it into an intrinsic,
> but on the other hand you could just directly do on it the IR transforms you
> want to do on the builtin.  At the IR level turning it into an intrinsic doesn't
> buy you much.  If it's not buying you anything, why do it?  On the other hand,
> you might then wonder why the intrinsics exist at all.  One answer is that you
> can use the intrinsics with vectors, which isn't usually the case with the
> libcall versions.
> 

The nice thing about the intrinsic forms is that you don't need to consider multiple types.

For example the loop vectorizer can vectorize sin intrinsics for any float type. To support sinf, sin, sinl you would have to have a case for each.

Another example can be found in the list of TODOs at the bottom of SimplifyLibCalls.cpp. Most of those transformation could be implemented with InstCombine rules to handle all types if given intrinsics.

I'm certainly open to any feedback or suggestions. 

paul

> At the codegen level things are a bit different.  If a libcall can be correctly
> turned into a target processor instruction, then at some point that conversion
> has to happen.  Thus the recognition of certain libcalls, and their conversion
> into a SDNode.
> 
> Ciao, Duncan.