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48 lines
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48 lines
2.2 KiB
Plaintext
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 18:25:42 -0600
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From: Vikram S. Adve <vadve@cs.uiuc.edu>
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To: Chris Lattner <sabre@nondot.org>
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Subject: RE: LLVM Concerns...
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> 1. Reference types
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> Right now, I've spec'd out the language to have a pointer type, which
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> works fine for lots of stuff... except that Java really has
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> references: constrained pointers that cannot be manipulated: added and
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> subtracted, moved, etc... Do we want to have a type like this? It
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> could be very nice for analysis (pointer always points to the start of
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> an object, etc...) and more closely matches Java semantics. The
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> pointer type would be kept for C++ like semantics. Through analysis,
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> C++ pointers could be promoted to references in the LLVM
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> representation.
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You're right, having references would be useful. Even for C++ the *static*
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compiler could generate references instead of pointers with fairly
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straightforward analysis. Let's include a reference type for now. But I'm
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also really concerned that LLVM is becoming big and complex and (perhaps)
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too high-level. After we get some initial performance results, we may have
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a clearer idea of what our goals should be and we should revisit this
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question then.
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> 2. Our "implicit" memory references in assembly language:
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> After thinking about it, this model has two problems:
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> A. If you do pointer analysis and realize that two stores are
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> independent and can share the same memory source object,
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not sure what you meant by "share the same memory source object"
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> there is
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> no way to represent this in either the bytecode or assembly.
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> B. When parsing assembly/bytecode, we effectively have to do a full
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> SSA generation/PHI node insertion pass to build the dependencies
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> when we don't want the "pinned" representation. This is not
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> cool.
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I understand the concern. But again, let's focus on the performance first
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and then look at the language design issues. E.g., it would be good to know
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how big the bytecode files are before expanding them further. I am pretty
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keen to explore the implications of LLVM for mobile devices. Both bytecode
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size and power consumption are important to consider there.
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--Vikram
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