On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 10:42 PM, Richard Guenther
<richard.guent...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 10:07 PM, Albert Cohen <albert.co...@inria.fr> wrote:
>> Sebastian Pop and I have been discussing the option of designing a new pass,
>> based on vrp, to normalize integer types towards a canonical supertype
>> typically a machine word, equivalent to signed long, or to truncate to a
>> smaller-size word when it makes sense. This would be a very simple pass (on
>> top of not-so-simple vrp), but arguably a quite regression-prone one as well
>> (due to aliases/escape and common C standard violations).
>>
>> The pass could be parameterized with three different objectives, depending
>> on where it is scheduled in the pass manager.
>>
>> (1) canonicalize to the supertype aggressively, to facilitate the
>> application of further passes like autovect which require very precise
>> understanding of the type conversions;
>> (2) compress the types to increase vectorization factor and reduce register
>> pressure (assuming the target supports sub-word register allocation with
>> register aliases);
>> (3) optimize the types to minimize the dynamic number of casts that result
>> in actual ASM instructions.
>>
>> Graphite and the vectorizer would clearly benefit from such a pass, at least
>> if it implemented objective (1).
>>
>> I wonder if some of this is already implemented somewhere, or if someone
>> played with it in the past, or is interesting in contributing.
>>
>> Nothing is planned yet on our side, and temporary fixes exist in the short
>> term (as far as Graphite and the vectorizer are concerned), but it would
>> potentially be of great help.
>
> This is certainly one useful transformation based on value-range information.
> The choice of a canonical type is of course at least target dependent.

This btw. can at least partly replace the SEE (or the missed ZEE) pass.

> I suppose you want to do this on register variables only?  Did you think about
> promoting function arguments and returns as well as part of an IPA pass?
>
> I don't understand how register variable promotion/demotion will help graphite
> though - I had the impression graphite can only work on memory.  No?
>
> Thanks,
> Richard.
>

Reply via email to