[llvm-dev] RFC: [SmallVector] Adding SVec<T> and Vec<T> convenience wrappers.

[Mehdi AMINI via llvm-dev]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 2:19 PM Chris Lattner via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> On Nov 17, 2020, at 1:42 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thoughts/suggestions:
>> - Adding the default seems very reasonable to me, and I think that 64
>> bytes is a good default.  I think you should change the behavior so that
>> SmallVector<LargeThing> defaults to a single inline element instead of zero
>> though.  Perhaps generate a static_assert when it is crazy large.
>>
>>
>> Out of curiosity: Why a single rather than zero?
>>
>>
>> My rationale for this is basically that SmallVector is typically used for
>> the case when you want to avoid an out-of-line allocation for a small
>> number of elements, this was the reason it was created.  While there is
>> some performance benefits of SmallVector<T,0> over std::vector<> they are
>> almost trivial.
>>
>>
>> The performance benefits aren't trivial.
>>
>> std::vector grow operations will refuse to use std::move for some T, a
>> pessimization required by its exception guarantees, even if you're building
>> with `-fno-exceptions`. We had a massive compile-time problem in 2016
>> related to this that I fixed with 3c406c2da52302eb5cced431373f240b9c037841
>> by switching to SmallVector<T,0>. You can see the history in r338071 /
>> 0f81faed05c3c7c1fbaf6af402411c99d715cf56.
>>
>
> That issue, at least, is fixable without switching from std::vector just
> by adding noexcept to the appropriate user-defined move constructors.
>
>
> Sure, once we’ve added noexcept to all types in LLVM/Clang/etc. That’s a
> pretty long tail though; a lot of work for relatively little gain given
> that we don’t care about exceptions anyway and we have an optimized vector
> implementation in tree.
>
>
> Can you spell this out for me?  Why do we need noexcept if we’re building
> with -fno-exceptions?  What is going on here?
>

It isn't clear to me that -fno-exceptions can get the same benefit as
noexcept for code that is written with exceptions in mind (I think
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61417534/can-stdvectort-use-ts-move-constructor-if-exceptions-are-disabled
explains some of it).

While it is possible to write a library that optimizes for -fno-exceptions,
I am not sure it would be standard-compliant for the STL to do so (and it'd
be anyway another code path that the one written in term of
`std::move_if_noexcept`).

Does it make sense or did you see it differently with your question?

-- 
Mehdi
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