[llvm-dev] LLVM log file

[Stefanos Baziotis via llvm-dev]

Hi David,

Sure I agree in part but "very misleading" is a strong statement and I
think we might want to see a different perspective. People present this
mental model in conferences [1]
"If you want to optimize, you use opt, which takes LLVM IR and generates
LLVM IR". We could say that this is misleading too, as it seems that opt
does the optimization, but is it really?
This an "Introduction to LLVM", going into specifics at this point would
probably confuse people a lot more than it would help them.

Same here [2]. Chandler was using clang -O2, then he used opt -O2
mentioning it as the "default" pipeline. Wow, that should be super
misleading, but again is it really? Would it help
if Chandler stopped and said "Oh by the way... Let me digress here and
explain a thing about libraries and opt etc."

With the same logic, when I said "target-independent" optimizations, that
was misleading too.

But my message was like, 1 page long already and I think spending another 1
page (or more) to explain such things would not help. And I think this is
similar for people in conferences and llvm posts.

Anyway, it's obvious that your message came with good intentions and I
appreciate that. But I think it should be mentioned that for any beginner
trying to understand the beast called LLVM,
it's not super important to know it now, at least IMHO. But it's good to be
mentioned that it's not the grand truth so that they come back to it when
they're more comfortable with the "approximation".

Best,
Stefanos

[1] https://youtu.be/J5xExRGaIIY?t=429
[2] https://youtu.be/s4wnuiCwTGU?t=433

Στις Τρί, 26 Ιαν 2021 στις 11:47 π.μ., ο/η David Chisnall via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> έγραψε:

> On 26/01/2021 02:53, Stefanos Baziotis via llvm-dev wrote:
> > Alright, now to use that: This is _not_ an option of Clang (or the Clang
> > driver; i.e., the command: clang test.c -print-after-all won't work),
> > but an option of opt. opt, in case you're not familiar with it, is
> > basically the middle-end optimizer of LLVM
>
> I think this is sufficiently close to being true that it ends up being
> very misleading.  I've seen a lot of posts on the mailing lists from
> people who have a mental model of LLVM like this.
>
> The opt tool is a thin wrapper around the LLVM pass pipeline
> infrastructure.  Most of the command-line flags for opt are not specific
> to opt, they are exposed by LLVM libraries.  Opt passes all of its
> arguments to LLVM, clang passes only the ones prefixed with -mllvm, but
> they are both handled by the same logic.
>
> Opt has some default pipelines with names such as -O1 and -O3 but these
> are *not* the same as the pipelines of the same names in clang (or other
> compilers that use LLVM).  This is a common source of confusion from
> people wondering why clang and opt give different output at -O2 (for
> example).
>
> The opt tool is primarily intended for unit testing.  It is a convenient
> way of running a single pass or sequence of passes (which is also useful
> for producing reduced test cases when a long pass pipeline generates a
> miscompile).  Almost none of the logic, including most of the
> command-line handling, is actually present in opt.
>
> David
>
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