[llvm-dev] RFC: Strong GC References in LLVM

[Philip Reames via llvm-dev]

Joining in very late, but the tangent here has been interesting (if 
rather OT for the original thread).

I agree with Danny that we might want to take a close look at how we 
model things like maythrow calls, no return, and other implicit control 
flow.  I'm not convinced that moving to a pure explicit model is the 
right idea because we get a lot of gain in practice from being able to 
reason about what are essentially a limited form of extended basic 
blocks.  I would welcome a design discussion about this, preferably in 
person, but also don't want to block any current (or future honestly) 
work on this until we have a reasonable firm plan of action.

One idea would be to explicitly acknowledge that our "basic blocks" are 
actually "extended basic blocks" with internal exits due to exception 
propagation, noreturn, and (recently) guards.  I could see a couple of 
implementation strategies here:
1) Extend BasicBlock to explicitly track potential early exiting 
instructions.  This would probably have to be conservative so that 
things like nothrow inference aren't required to update all callers in 
one go.
2) Conservative assume that BasicBlock has an unknown number of early 
exiting instructions and write an analysis pass which answers questions 
about where those early exits are.  Any pass which does code motion 
would require this analysis.  (This is essentially the principled 
version of our current hacks.)

Philip

On 07/15/2016 06:57 PM, Daniel Berlin wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 5:25 PM, Andrew Trick <atrick at apple.com 
> <mailto:atrick at apple.com>> wrote:
>
>
>>     On Jul 15, 2016, at 4:48 PM, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov
>>     <mailto:hfinkel at anl.gov>> wrote:
>>
>>     Why? A decision was made to give pointers types, and we've
>>     decided to change that. It is not clear to me that the decision
>>     to allow implicit early exits was, in retrospect, optimal. I
>>     think it is completely healthy for the project to reevaluate
>>     these kinds of decisions. We now have many years of experience,
>>     bug reports, and we should have a good ability to evaluate the
>>     compile-time impact of a potential change.
>
>     Let me rephrase: It didn’t seem to me like the fundamental problem
>     we were up against in this discussion, and it’s definitely very
>     difficult to change given the burden it would place on intrinsics.
>
>
> Yes, this discussion has gone a bit off track, which i will apologize for.
>
>     FWIW, for a long time I was a very strong proponent of explicit
>     control flow because I like making it easy to reason about CFG
>     transforms and code motion. But I gradually came around to realize
>     it’s a legitimate design either way. In some ways it works well
>     not to have a CFG edge for exits where it’s illegal to insert code.
>
>
>     I think LLVM passes have also been biased toward algorithms that
>     scale in the number of blocks.
>
> If this scaling is a design goal that's really interesting. Most of 
> the memory opt and code motion algorithms i've worked on in LLVM are 
> block/instruction-capped in the same way (and most have lower caps 
> than GCC due to compile time impact on llvm).
> There certainly was a time when that wasn't true (i remember back in 
> the day :P), but it's no longer true.
>
> Of course, I don't actually think either design necessarily makes 
> scaling easier or harder, that's just "the state of the world".
>
>

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