[LLVMdev] Implicit basic block labels?

[Sean Silva]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Paul Sokolovsky <pmiscml at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I only recently started to look at LLVM assembly generated by Clang,
> and one of the first thing I saw was like:
>
> define i32 @foo(i32 %a, i32 %b) nounwind {
>   %1 = tail call i32 @bar(i32 %a) nounwind
>   %2 = icmp eq i32 %1, 0
>   br i1 %2, label %5, label %3
>
> ; <label>:3                                       ; preds = %0
>   %4 = add nsw i32 %b, %a
>   br label %7
>
> I wondered what "; <label>:3" would mean and how absent label relates
> to the language syntax. http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html says "Each
> basic block may optionally start with a label", that's all. I googled
> around and scratched my head for half an hour, still found nothing
> (used terms like "llvm implicit basic block labels" and "llvm implicit
> basic block labels"), but after peering into that dump long enough and
> applying induction on temporary var naming in API (where there's no
> naming at all, it's all just external representation), I finally was
> able to understand logic of it:
>
> 1. For each function, "unnamed entity" counter is initialized with 0.
> 2. Whenever unnamed tmp var is seen, it's assigned name as counter++
> value.
> 3. Whenever unlabeled block is seen, it's assigned label as counter++
> value.
>
>
> Still, the questions are:
>
> 1. Where is this documented, and why http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html
> doesn't have it? (I didn't re-read it completely on this occasion,
> but grepped for all occurrences of "label" - none was relevant).
>
>
The closest it gets to talking about it I think is that itsays "Unnamed
temporaries are numbered sequentially", although it says it in a context
where the implication is that this applies to the results of instructions,
with no mention of BB names.


> 2. Why label is not rendered explicitly? Putting instead comment like
> "; <label>:3" is as helpful and non-confusing as dumping tmp var names
> as:
>
>  /* temporary 1 */ = tail call i32 @bar(i32 %a)
>
> (assuming LLVM syntax would have stream-type comments besides line-type
> ";").
>
>
Printing a comment there is pretty useless. It's probably historical.

It should be pretty easy to change AssemblyWriter::printBasicBlock in
lib/IR/AsmWriter.cpp to print out a "unnamed" name for the BB, but the hard
part will be to ensure that the new policy will properly round-trip (i.e.,
can be parsed back; even in the presence of user-defined names). Also, we
like to keep the textual IR as compatible as possible, so the change would
have to be fully backward compatible.

Alternatively, you could use the experience from your wild goose chase to
choose a good location to document this strange behavior (in LangRef) so
that another person will be likely to find it.

-- Sean Silva
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