The motivation here is simple loops with unsigned induction variables w/non-one steps. A toy example would be:
for (unsigned i = 0; i < N; i += 2) { body; }
Given C/C++ semantics, we do not get the nuw flag on the induction variable. Given that lack, we currently can't compute a bound for this loop. We can do better for many cases, depending on the contents of "body".
The basic intuition behind this patch is as follows:
- A step which evenly divides the iteration space must wrap through the same numbers repeatedly. And thus, we can ignore potential cornercases where we exit after the n-th wrap through uint32_max.
- Per C++ rules, infinite loops without side effects are UB. We already have code in SCEV which relies on this.
Together, these let us conclude that the trip count of this loop must come before unsigned overflow unless the body would form a well defined infinite loop.
A couple notes for reviewers:
- I reused the loop properties code which is overly conservative for this case. I'll follow up in another patch to generalize it for the actual UB rules.
- We could cache the n(s/u)w facts. I left that out because doing a pre-patch which cached existing inference showed a lot of diffs I had trouble fully explaining. I plan to get back to this, but I don't want it on the critical path.
Is this actually true? For C++, I was able to find that
Is it different in LLVM? A loop that only reads volatile memory is non-side-effecting, but I'd be surprised if we considered it finite.