[LLVMdev] Adding masked vector load and store intrinsics

[dag at cray.com]

Nadav Rotem <nrotem at apple.com> writes:

> I oppose adding new first-level instructions because we would need to
> teach all of the existing optimizations about the new instructions,
> and considering the limited usefulness of masked operations it is not
> worth the effort.

Limited usefulness?  It is quite the opposite.  If we were starting from
scratch on an IR, we'd want to have first-class mask support, with masks
as an additional operand to nearly every IR instructions.  Given where
we are, target-independent intrinsics seems like a good compromise
because as you said it would be a huge task to teach all of the existing
LLVM code about a new instruction operand.  With intrinsics, passes are
conservative when they see an intrinsic they don't understand.  We can
teach passes about specific intrinsics as we find benefit in doing so.

                                  -David