Local values are constants or addresses that can't be folded into
the instruction that uses them. FastISel materializes these in a
"local value" area that always dominates the current insertion
point, to try to avoid materializing these values more than once
(per block).
https://reviews.llvm.org/D43093 added code to sink these local
value instructions to their first use, which has two beneficial
effects. One, it is likely to avoid some unnecessary spills and
reloads; two, it allows us to attach the debug location of the
user to the local value instruction. The latter effect can
improve the debugging experience for debuggers with a "set next
statement" feature, such as the Visual Studio debugger and PS4
debugger, because instructions to set up constants for a given
statement will be associated with the appropriate source line.
There are also some constants (primarily addresses) that could be
produced by no-op casts or GEP instructions; the main difference
from "local value" instructions is that these are values from
separate IR instructions, and therefore could have multiple users
across multiple basic blocks. D43093 avoided sinking these, even
though they were emitted to the same "local value" area as the
other instructions. The patch comment for D43093 states:
Local values may also be used by no-op casts, which adds the register to the RegFixups table. Without reversing the RegFixups map direction, we don't have enough information to sink these instructions.
This patch undoes most of D43093, and instead flushes the local
value map after(*) every IR instruction, using that instruction's
debug location. This avoids sometimes incorrect locations used
previously, and emits instructions in a more natural order.
In addition, constants materialized due to PHI instructions are
not assigned a debug location immediately; instead, when th
local value map is flushed, if the first local value instruction
has no debug location, it is given the same location as the
first non-local-value-map instruction. This prevents PHIs
from introducing unattributed instructions, which would either
be implicitly attributed to the location for the preceding IR
instruction, or given line 0 if they are at the beginning of
a machine basic block. Neither of those consequences is good
for debugging.
This does mean materialized values are not re-used across IR
instruction boundaries; however, only about 5% of those values
were reused in an experimental self-build of clang.
(*) Actually, just prior to the next instruction. It seems like
it would be cleaner the other way, but I was having trouble
getting that to work.
There is additional cleanup to be done after the functional
patch; the SinkLocalValues option can go away, as well as
the LastFlushPoint member. I figured the functional patch
is big enough as it is, and these NFC follow-ups would be easy.
be
This dead local value removal logic was part of D43093, right? At least, that's what I remember. Anyway, it's pretty simple, so I agree we should keep it.