Conceptually, the implementation is pretty straightforward: we put each
literal value into a hashtable, and then write out the keys of that
hashtable at the end.
In contrast with ELF, the Mach-O format does not support variable-length
literals that aren't strings. Its literals are either 4, 8, or 16 bytes
in length. LLD-ELF dedups its literals via sorting + uniq'ing, but since
we don't need to worry about overly-long values, we should be able to do
a faster job by just hashing.
That said, the implementation right now is far from optimal, because we
add to those hashtables serially. To parallelize this, we'll need a
basic concurrent hashtable (only needs to support concurrent writes w/o
interleave reads), which shouldn't be to hard to implement, but I'd like
to punt on it for now.
Numbers for linking chromium_framework on my 3.2 GHz 16-Core Intel Xeon W:
N Min Max Median Avg Stddev
x 20 4.27 4.39 4.315 4.3225 0.033225703
+ 20 4.36 4.82 4.44 4.4845 0.13152846
Difference at 95.0% confidence
0.162 +/- 0.0613971
3.74783% +/- 1.42041%
(Student's t, pooled s = 0.0959262)
This corresponds to binary size savings of 2MB out of 335MB, or 0.6%.
It's not a great tradeoff as-is, but as mentioned our implementation can
be signficantly optimized, and literal dedup will unlock more
opportunities for ICF to identify identical structures that reference
the same literals.
Reviewed By: #lld-macho, gkm
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D103113
Jez Ng