[llvm-dev] TBAA

[Victor Yodaiken via llvm-dev]

Thanks. I am working on it. So far I cannot find cases other than the
obvious loop hoisting ones - which C programmers can do themselves.

vy


On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 1:13 PM David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't have great data, but if you have any relevant benchmarks of your
> own you can try them -f{no-}strict-aliasing to compare their performance
>
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 11:11 AM Victor Yodaiken <
> victor.yodaiken at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Exactly.  The C Standards committee has justified complex rules for
>> programmers and compiler writers ( which seem to often cause programmers to
>> yell at compiler writers) on the basis of optimization gains - but without
>> much documentation. I am looking for information on whether those are
>> significant enough to justify the tradeoff.
>>
>> thanks
>> vy
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 1:03 PM David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 10:13 AM Richard Kenner via llvm-dev <
>>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> > I would think that in a language like C, the role of the optimizer
>>>> > should be to do optimizations that are difficult or impossible or
>>>> > time consuming for the programmer.
>>>>
>>>> That's a philosphical question.  Keep in mind that very few
>>>> programmers nowadays, even in C, have a good idea of the underlying
>>>> machine model (or even the fact that there *is* such a model), so they
>>>> don't really even know what to do.  Also, think of macro expansion and
>>>> such.  And maintenance costs over time if you add all of the
>>>> "clutter".  I would argue against that view.
>>>>
>>>> > My concern is that TBAA has a trade-off in terms of the complexity of
>>>> the
>>>> > language for the programmer
>>>>
>>>> I don't understand.  TBAA implements the rules of the programming
>>>> language
>>>> with respect to aliasing.  It doesn't change the language in any way,
>>>> so
>>>> I don't see how it can increase the complexity for the programmer.
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps you're arguing that anti-aliasing rules in languages aren't
>>>> worth the complexity, but that's a different issue and one that language
>>>> design groups look at, not compiler writers.
>>>>
>>>
>>> There's a lot of overlap, and it's probably good for language design
>>> groups to be talking to compiler writers (as in this thread) to understand
>>> what really matters in practice - if the answer was "there aren't
>>> significant benefits to using TBAA" then maybe that'd inform language
>>> design groups to remove such requirements from their specifications, etc. I
>>> expect that's where Victor is coming at this from - to understand/gather
>>> implementation experience to inform language design.
>>>
>>> Or potentially to inform compiler implementations - violating TBAA is
>>> UB, so it's valid for an implementation to define that behavior (eg: could
>>> change the default to be -fno-strict-aliasing).
>>>
>>
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