When we know the value we're extending is a negative constant then it
makes sense to use SIGN_EXTEND because this may improve code quality in
some cases, particularly when doing a constant splat of an unpacked vector
type. For example, for SVE when splatting the value -1 into all elements
of a vector of type <vscale x 2 x i32> the element type will get promoted
from i32 -> i64. In this case we want the splat value to sign-extend from
(i32 -1) -> (i64 -1), whereas currently it zero-extends from
(i32 -1) -> (i64 0xFFFFFFFF). Sign-extending the constant means we can use
a single mov immediate instruction.
New tests added here:
CodeGen/AArch64/sve-vector-splat.ll
I believe we see some code quality improvements in these existing
tests too:
CodeGen/AArch64/dag-numsignbits.ll CodeGen/AArch64/reduce-and.ll CodeGen/AArch64/unfold-masked-merge-vector-variablemask.ll
The apparent regressions in CodeGen/AArch64/fast-isel-cmp-vec.ll only
occur because the test disables codegen prepare and branch folding.
There's no guarantee that the caller would use getAnyExtOrTrunc. I think this should be in the constant folding for getNode(ISD::ANY_EXTEND)