Notes from a Walter Bright talk at Northwest C++ Group (16 Jan 2025) (Video):
- No real reading material out in the world for CodeGen (as opposed to parsing/lexing, semantics, etc)
- Talking about DMD's CodeGen; not based on any prior art (LLVM, Gnu, etc); Boost-licensed
- Understanding code generator is understanding their data structures
- Expression Tree Structure: operation, type, flags, count, comsub, plus union (for constants, values, etc)
- (Compile DMD sample functions w/ --b to dump trees, --b --f with full disclosure)
- Block Tree Structure: goto/iftrue/ret/retexp, expression tree, (list) next block to execute, next block in fn, genned code
- Code Structure: next, flags, lop (operator), lea (effective address), IFL1 (), IEV1 (), IFL2 (), IEV2 ()
- Local optimizations: doing expression reshuffling to save a register
- two pairs of addition expressions, results added to each other (a + b) + (c + d), rewrite it to (((a + b) + c) + d) we can just keep accumulating in the one register
- (Is this term rewriting?)
- common subexpressions: (2 * b) / (3 + (2 * b)) can point the two (2 * b) nodes to point to one w/reference counting
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Register Masks (integer, FP, XMM, regs preserved by fn, regs we'd like to save); makes for a very fast codegenerator
- Effective Address:
- offset
- base register + offset
- base + index * scale + offset
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Entry Point - dout.writefunc() (operates on per-fn basis); sets up symtabl, (optionally) runs intermediate code optimizer (dataflow analysis), calls codegen() (the code generator), shuts down and emits debug info, saves results for possible inlining
- Code Generator:
-
If optimized, loop:
- Generate code in depth-first order (not dataflow analysis(DFA))
- allocate unused registers to variables (until no more regs can be allocated)
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else:
- loop through block list generating code in that order
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Code Generator pt 2:
- Compute locations of local vars
- Generate fn prolog and epilog
- assign addresses in genned code
- pinhole optimizations: optimize specific instructions to a simpler instructions where possible
- optimize jumps
- generate switch tables
- emit genned code
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(Example from DMD)
- Register Allocated: compute "live range" of each variable (bit vector of the basic blocks, bit set for ecah block a variable is live in); Codegen sets a bit for each reg used in each block; variable mapped to a register if that register is not used in any of the blocks the variable is live in (more bitmasking); done in a loop until no more variables can be enregistered
- Finishing Things Up: write code bytes to buffer; write fixups; write obj code to file (ELF, Mach, MS COFF, obsolete Win32/Intel OMF)
- Fixups: delayed-resolution determination of addresses; has the following:
- location of the fixup
- name of the symbol
- offset from that symbol
- relative or absolute
- confusing and poorly documented
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Inherent Limitations (of this code generator):
- Can't use the *H registers (not independent registers)
- 64-bit bitmask registers means no more registers can fit in them
- cannot have loops inside of expression tree; limits inlining possibilities
- x87 is "giant kludge"; uses its own code generator
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Why is Codegen So Complicated: 8-bit CPUs had ~40 instructions; AArch64 has 2000+ instructions each with variations
Research terms:
- "peephole" optimizations: replace an instruction or set of instructions w/simpler instruction
- Term rewriting?
- Dataflow Analysis (DFA)
- Register allocation by coloring (bitmasking)
Tags:
language development
language
reading
Last modified 07 July 2025