Less than a week to go

Less than a week remains until the coding period officially starts. Since the last post a few things changed. For starters I didn't get to implement the debugify-each mode cause someone else already had a semi working implementation for it, witch recently landed for reviews.

Meanwhile using data from a talk given earlier this year we figured that SROA reports a lot of DI Loss occurrences and debugify confirms that. It's also pretty early in the pipeline, so it's even more important. So, I've been reading through the code and learning about it. A great help has been this paper which tries to explain the goals of the scalar replacement of aggregates.

SORA is a big and complicated pass. I found this mail from way back then from Chandler Carruth (who rewrote the pass to it's current form), that explains the basic underlying logic of the partitioning and splitting that takes place in the algorithm.

There is still a lot left for me to begin to understand how the pass works, and as a way of doing that I am currently hunting down when the following DI loss occurs:

Before SROA:

entry:
  %a.addr = alloca i32, align 4
  %n.addr = alloca i32, align 4
  %i = alloca i32, align 4
  store i32 %a, i32* %a.addr, align 4, !tbaa !9
  store i32 %n, i32* %n.addr, align 4, !tbaa !9
  %0 = bitcast i32* %i to i8*, !dbg !13
  call void @llvm.lifetime.start(i64 4, i8* %0) #2, !dbg !13
  store i32 0, i32* %i, align 4, !dbg !14, !tbaa !9
  br label %for.cond, !dbg !13

for.cond:                                         ; preds = %for.inc, %entry
  %1 = load i32, i32* %i, align 4, !dbg !15, !tbaa !9
  %2 = load i32, i32* %n.addr, align 4, !dbg !17, !tbaa !9
  %cmp = icmp slt i32 %1, %2, !dbg !18
  br i1 %cmp, label %for.body, label %for.cond.cleanup, !dbg !19

After SROA:

entry:
  br label %for.cond, !dbg !9

for.cond:                                         ; preds = %for.inc, %entry
  %a.addr.0 = phi i32 [ %a, %entry ], [ %0, %for.inc ]
  %i.0 = phi i32 [ 0, %entry ], [ %inc, %for.inc ], !dbg !10
  %cmp = icmp slt i32 %i.0, %n, !dbg !12
  br i1 %cmp, label %for.body, label %for.cond.cleanup, !dbg !14

Notice the missing DI in the first φ instruction of the for.cond block.

Closing thoughts

I am still very disoriented in the codebase and I am trying to understand how things interact with each other. I believe I have made some progress but there are still so many things to read and learn and I haven't even started to code yet!

The community is extremely active, the code is well documented, the dev tools are amazing and every singe day I spend reading code and documentation I learn countless new exciting things. As much as I am scared of the vastness of the project I am also excited to have this chance to work with all these great developers.