Getting accurate locations for loops is important, because those locations are
used by the frontend to generate optimization remarks. Currently, optimization
remarks for loops often appear on the wrong line, often the first line of the
loop body instead of the loop itself. This is confusing because that line might
itself be another loop, or might be somewhere else completely if the body was
inlined function call. This happens because of the way we find the loop's
starting location. First, we look for a preheader, and if we find one, and its
terminator has a debug location, then we use that. Otherwise, we look for a
location on an instruction in the loop header.
The fallback heuristic is not bad, but will almost always find the beginning of
the body, and not the loop statement itself. The preheader location search
often fails because there's often not a preheader, and even when there is a
preheader, depending on how it was formed, it sometimes carries the location of
some preceeding code.
I don't see any good theoretical way to fix this problem. On the other hand,
this seems like a straightforward solution: Put the debug location in the
loop's llvm.loop metadata. A companion Clang patch will cause Clang to insert
llvm.loop metadata with appropriate locations when generating debugging
information. With these changes, our loop remarks have much more accurate
locations.
Differential Revision: http://reviews.llvm.org/D19738
llvm-svn: 270771
Hal Finkel