Before this change, the *InstPrinter.cpp files of each target where some
of the slowest objects to compile in all of LLVM. See this snippet produced by
ClangBuildAnalyzer:
https://reviews.llvm.org/P8171$96
Search for "InstPrinter", and see that it shows up in a few places.
Tablegen was emitting a large switch containing a sequence of operand checks,
each of which created many conditions and many BBs. Register allocation and
jump threading both did not scale well with such a large repetitive sequence of
basic blocks.
So, this change essentially turns those control flow structures into
data. The previous structure looked like:
switch (Opc) { case TGT::ADD: // check alias 1 if (MI->getOperandCount() == N && // check num opnds MI->getOperand(0).isReg() && // check opnd 0 ... MI->getOperand(1).isImm() && // check opnd 1 AsmString = "foo"; break; } // check alias 2 if (...) ... return false;
The new structure looks like:
OpToPatterns: Sorted table of opcodes mapping to pattern indices. \-> Patterns: List of patterns. Previous table points to subrange of patterns to match. \-> Conds: The if conditions above encoded as a kind and 32-bit value.
See MCInstPrinter.cpp for the details of how the new data structures are
interpreted.
Here are some before and after metrics.
Time to compile AArch64InstPrinter.cpp:
0m29.062s vs. 0m2.203s
size of the obj:
3.9M vs. 676K
size of clang.exe:
97M vs. 96M
I have not benchmarked disassembly performance, but typically
disassemblers are bottlenecked on IO and string processing, not alias
matching, so I'm not sure it's interesting enough to be worth doing.
Nit: I think the first "To" was supposed to be "Too"