Summary:
This is intended to replace the current YAML format for general use.
It's ~10x more compact than YAML, and ~40% more compact than gzipped YAML:
llvmidx.riff = 20M, llvmidx.yaml = 272M, llvmidx.yaml.gz = 32M
It's also simpler/faster to read and write.
The format is a RIFF container (chunks of (type, size, data)) with:
- a compressed string table
- simple binary encoding of symbols (with varints for compactness)
It can be extended to include occurrences, Dex posting lists, etc.
There's no rich backwards-compatibility scheme, but a version number is included
so we can detect incompatible files and do ad-hoc back-compat.
Alternatives considered:
- compressed YAML or JSON: bulky and slow to load
- llvm bitstream: confusing model and libraries are hard to use. My attempt
produced slightly larger files, and the code was longer and slower.
- protobuf or similar: would be really nice (esp for back-compat) but the
dependency is a big hassle
- ad-hoc binary format without a container: it seems clear we're going
to add posting lists and occurrences here, and that they will benefit
from sharing a string table. The container makes it easy to debug
these pieces in isolation, and make them optional.
Reviewers: ioeric
Subscribers: mgorny, ilya-biryukov, MaskRay, jkorous, mgrang, arphaman, kadircet, cfe-commits
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D51585
llvm-svn: 341375
Sam McCall