This patch introduces a new intrinsic @llvm.experimental.vector.splice
that constructs a vector of the same type as the two input vectors,
based on a immediate where the sign of the immediate distinguishes two
variants. A positive immediate specifies an index into the first vector
and a negative immediate specifies the number of trailing elements to
extract from the first vector.
For example:
@llvm.experimental.vector.splice(<A,B,C,D>, <E,F,G,H>, 1) ==> <B, C, D, E> ; index @llvm.experimental.vector.splice(<A,B,C,D>, <E,F,G,H>, -3) ==> <B, C, D, E> ; trailing element count
These intrinsics support both fixed and scalable vectors, where the
former is lowered to a shufflevector to maintain existing behaviour,
although while marked as experimental the recommended way to express
this operation for fixed-width vectors is to use shufflevector. For
scalable vectors where it is not possible to express a shufflevector
mask for this operation, a new ISD node has been implemented.
This is one of the named shufflevector intrinsics proposed on the
mailing-list in the RFC at [1].
Patch by Paul Walker and Cullen Rhodes.
[1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-November/146864.html
Does this mention that %trailing.elt must be a constant?