When the Dwarf Version metadata was initially added (r184276) there was
no support for Module::Max - though the comment suggested that was the
desired behavior. The original behavior was Module::Warn which would
warn and then pick whichever version came first - which is pretty
arbitrary/luck-based if the consumer has some need for one version or
the other.
Now that the functionality's been added (r303590) this change updates
the implementation to match the desired goal.
The general logic here is - if you compile /some/ of your program with a
more recent DWARF version, you must have a consumer that can handle it,
so might as well use it for /everything/.
The only place where this might fall down is if you have a need to use
an old tool (supporting only the older DWARF version) for some subset of
your program. In which case now it'll all be the higher version. That
seems pretty narrow (& the inverse could happen too - you specifically
/need/ the higher DWARF version for some extra expressivity, etc, in
some part of the program)
IRgen optimization opportunities.
//===---------------------------------------------------------------------===//
The common pattern of
--
short x; // or char, etc
(x == 10)
--
generates an zext/sext of x which can easily be avoided.
//===---------------------------------------------------------------------===//
Bitfields accesses can be shifted to simplify masking and sign
extension. For example, if the bitfield width is 8 and it is
appropriately aligned then is is a lot shorter to just load the char
directly.
//===---------------------------------------------------------------------===//
It may be worth avoiding creation of alloca's for formal arguments
for the common situation where the argument is never written to or has
its address taken. The idea would be to begin generating code by using
the argument directly and if its address is taken or it is stored to
then generate the alloca and patch up the existing code.
In theory, the same optimization could be a win for block local
variables as long as the declaration dominates all statements in the
block.
NOTE: The main case we care about this for is for -O0 -g compile time
performance, and in that scenario we will need to emit the alloca
anyway currently to emit proper debug info. So this is blocked by
being able to emit debug information which refers to an LLVM
temporary, not an alloca.
//===---------------------------------------------------------------------===//
We should try and avoid generating basic blocks which only contain
jumps. At -O0, this penalizes us all the way from IRgen (malloc &
instruction overhead), all the way down through code generation and
assembly time.
On 176.gcc:expr.ll, it looks like over 12% of basic blocks are just
direct branches!
//===---------------------------------------------------------------------===//
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