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author | Kartik Agaram <vc@akkartik.com> | 2020-03-06 00:06:42 -0800 |
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committer | Kartik Agaram <vc@akkartik.com> | 2020-03-06 00:06:42 -0800 |
commit | 4032286f9bb231139b733e5444b862006d3b9119 (patch) | |
tree | 04f3c32508c62ff28f99f8355459df3529a99b02 /tools | |
parent | 0657fc16ab8d8f86d84b52a8998715c32bc78eb9 (diff) | |
download | mu-4032286f9bb231139b733e5444b862006d3b9119.tar.gz |
6082 - bugfix in spilling register vars
In the process I'm starting to realize that my approach to avoiding spills isn't ideal. It works for local variables but not to avoid spilling outputs. To correctly decide whether to spill to an output register or not, we really need to analyze when a variable is live. If we don't do that, we'll end up in one of two bad situations: a) Don't spill the outermost use of an output register (or just the outermost scope in a function). This is weird because it's hard to explain to the programmer why they can overwrite a local with an output above a '{' but not below. b) Disallow overwriting entirely. This is easier to communicate but quite inconvenient. It's nice to be able to use eax for some temporary purpose before overwriting it with the final result of a function. If we instead track liveness, things are convenient and also easier to explain. If a temporary is used after the output has been written that's an obvious problem: "you clobbered the output". (It seems more reasonable to disallow multiple live ranges for the output. Once an output is written it can only be shadowed in a nested block.) That's the bad news. Now for some good news: One lovely property Mu the language has at the moment is that live ranges are guaranteed to be linear segments of code. We don't need to analyze loop-carried dependences. This means that we can decide whether a variable is live purely by scanning later statements for its use. (Defining 'register use' is slightly non-trivial; primitives must somehow specify when they read their output register.) So we don't actually need to worry about a loop reading a register with one type and writing to another type at the end of an iteration. The only way that can happen is if the write at the end was to a local variable, and we're guaranteeing that local variables will be reclaimed at the end of the iteration. So, the sequence of tasks: a) compute register liveness b1) verify that all register variables used at any point in a program are always the topmost use of that register. b2) decide whether to spill/shadow, clobber or flag an error. There's still the open question of where to attach liveness state. It can't be on a var, because liveness varies by use of the var. It can't be on a statement because we may want to know the liveness of variables not referenced in a given statement. Conceptually we want a matrix of locals x stmts (flattened). But I think it's simpler than that. We just want to know liveness at the time of variable declarations. A new register variable can be in one of three states w.r.t. its previous definition: either it's shadowing it, or it can clobber it, or there's a conflict and we need to raise an error. I think we can compute this information for each variable definition by an analysis similar to existing ones, maintaining a stack of variable definitions. The major difference is that we don't pop variables when a block ends. Details to be worked out. But when we do I hope to get these pending tests passing.
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