Re: Question about GCC's standard dependent optimization

[Jeff Law]

On 06/26/14 14:13, Jeff Law wrote:
On 06/26/14 02:44, Bin.Cheng wrote:
Hi,
I ran into PR60947, in which GCC understands the return value of
memset is the first argument passed in, according to standard, then
does optimization like below:
     mov    ip, sp
     stmfd    sp!, {r4, r5, r6, r7, r8, r9, r10, fp, ip, lr, pc}
     sub    fp, ip, #4
     sub    sp, sp, #20
     ldr    r8, [r0, #112]
     add    r3, r8, #232
     add    r4, r8, #328
.L1064:
     mov    r0, r3
     mov    r1, #255
     mov    r2, #8
     bl    memset
     add    r3, r0, #32   <----X
     cmp    r3, r4
     bne    .L1064
For X insn, GCC takes advantage of standard by using the returned r0
directly.

My question is, is it always safe for GCC to do such optimization?  Do
we have an option to disable such standard dependent optimization?
Others have already answered this question.

FWIW, I just locally added the capability to track equivalences between
the destination argument to the various mem* str* functions and their
return value in DOM.  It triggers, but not terribly often.  I'll be
looking to see if the additional equivalences actually enable any
optimizations before going through the full bootstrap and test.
Just as a follow-up.  This turns out to be a relatively bad idea as it 
gets in the way of tail call optimizations.

Probably the only place where this is going to really be useful is in 
the allocators to allow us to cheaply rematerialize values and/or tie 
together two values that normally wouldn't be seen as related to each other.

Jeff