[Mlir-commits] [mlir] Add a tutorial on mlir-opt (PR #96105)

[Jeremy Kun]

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+# Using `mlir-opt`
+
+`mlir-opt` is the command-line entry point for running passes and lowerings on MLIR code.
+This tutorial will explain how to use `mlir-opt` to run passes, and explain
+some details about MLIR's built-in dialects along the way.
+
+Prerequisites:
+
+- [Building MLIR from source](/getting_started/)
+
+[TOC]
+
+## Overview
+
+We start with a brief summary of context that helps to frame
+the uses of `mlir-opt` detailed in this article.
+For a deeper dive on motivation and design,
+see [the MLIR paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11054).
+
+Two of the central concepts in MLIR are *dialects* and *lowerings*.
+In traditional compilers, there is typically one "dialect,"
+called an *intermediate representation*, or IR,
+that is the textual or data-structural description of a program
+within the scope of the compiler's execution.
+For example, in GCC the IR is called GIMPLE,
+and in LLVM it's called LLVM-IR.
+Compilers typically convert an input program to their IR,
+run optimization passes,
+and then convert the optimized IR to machine code.
+
+MLIR's philosophy is to split the job into smaller steps.
+First, MLIR allows one to define many IRs called *dialects*,
+some considered "high level" and some "low level,"
+but each with a set of types, operations, metadata,
+and semantics that defines what the operations do.
+Different dialects may coexist in the same program.
+Then, one writes a set of *lowering passes*
+that incrementally converts different parts of the program
+from higher level dialects to lower and lower dialects
+until you get to machine code
+(or, in many cases, LLVM, which finishes the job).
+Along the way,
+*optimizing passes* are run to make the code more efficient.
+The main point here is that the high level dialects exist
+*so that* they make it easy to write these important optimizing passes.
+
+A central motivation for building MLIR
+was to build the `affine` dialect,
+which is designed to enable [polyhedral optimizations](https://polyhedral.info/)
+for loop transformations.
+Compiler engineers had previously implemented polyhedral optimizations
+in LLVM and GCC (without an `affine` dialect),
+and it was difficult because they had to reconstruct well-structured loop nests
+from a much more complicated set of low-level operations.
+Having a higher level `affine` dialect preserves the loop nest structure
+at an abstraction layer that makes it easier to write optimizations,
+and then discards it during lowering passes.
+
+The `mlir-opt` tool can run both
+optimization passes and lowerings,
+though the final code generation
+is performed by a different tool called `mlir-translate`.
+In particular, `mlir-opt` consumes MLIR as input and produce MLIR as output,
+while `mlir-translate` consumes MLIR as input
+and produces non-MLIR program representations as output.
+
----------------
j2kun wrote:

> It is intended as a testing and debugging utility

This makes it sound like production use cases do not invoke `mlir-opt` directly, but surely that can't be true... You mean to say that they build their own `mlir-opt`-like tool and invoke that instead?

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/96105