This patch moves the construction of the default backend from llvm-mca.cpp and into mca::Context. The Context class is responsible for holding ownership of the simulated hardware components. These components are subclasses of HardwareUnit. Right now the HardwareUnit is pretty bare-bones, but eventually we might want to add some common functionality across all hardware components, such as isReady() or something similar.
I have a feeling this patch will probably need some updates, but it's a start. One thing I am not particularly fond of is the rather large interface for createDefaultPipeline. That convenience routine takes a rather large set of inputs from the llvm-mca driver, where many of those inputs are generated via command line options.
One item I think we might want to change is the separating of ownership of hardware components (owned by the context) and the pipeline (which owns Stages). In short, a Pipeline owns Stages, a Context (currently) owns hardware. The Pipeline's Stages make use of the components, and thus there is a lifetime dependency generated. The components must outlive the pipeline. We could solve this by having the Context also own the Pipeline, and not return a unique_ptr<Pipeline>. Now that I think about it, I like that idea more.
I don;t see any such "utility routines" for now. Remove ?