Arm specific codegen prepare is implemented to perform type promotion
on icmp operands, which can enable the removal of uxtb and uxth
(unsigned extend) instructions. This is possible because performing
type promotion before ISel alleviates this duty from the DAG builder,
which has to perform legalisation, but has a limited view on data
ranges.
The pass visits any instruction operand of an icmp and creates a
worklist to traverse the use-def tree to determine whether the values
can simply be promoted. Our concern is values in the registers
overflowing the narrow (i8, i16) data range, so instructions marked
with nuw can be promoted easily. For add and sub instructions, we are
able to use the parallel dsp instructions to operate on scalar data
types and avoid overflowing bits. Underflowing adds and subs are also
permitted when the result is only used by an unsigned icmp.
It may be good to copy the description you have of the algorithm in the commit message to here (or something similar)