LLVM Weekly - #89, Sep 14th 2015

Welcome to the eighty-ninth issue of LLVM Weekly, a weekly newsletter (published every Monday) covering developments in LLVM, Clang, and related projects. LLVM Weekly is brought to you by Alex Bradbury. Subscribe to future issues at https://llvmweekly.org and pass it on to anyone else you think may be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to asb@asbradbury.org, or @llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter.

News and articles from around the web

I didn't spot any new LLVM-related articles or news this week. As a reminder, I always welcome tips either via email or Twitter. Seeing as there's nothing new, now seems a good time to point you towards either Stephen Diehl's tutorial on implementing a JIT compiled language with Haskell and LLVM or Adrian Sampson's 'LLVM for grad students'.

On the mailing lists

• James Knight is proposing to deprecate and remove the old SelectionDAG scheduler, given that machine schedulers are now the preferred approach. He notes that a number of in-tree targets still use the SelectionDAG scheduler. It seems there is support for this plan.

• Jauhien is curious about the availability of a C API for the ORC JIT, with the motivating use case here being to provide a binding for Rust. The main concern is that the ORC API is not yet stable, meaning it's not feasible to provide stable C bindings. The proposal is they live in llvm/include/llvm-c/unstable.

• Joseph Tremoulet has a whole bunch of questions about addrspacecast semantics, and Chandler Carruth has a whole bunch of answers.

• David Chisnall has a useful response to a question about implementing LLVM intrinsics with multiple return values. As he points out, this is usually done by returning a struct.

LLVM commits

• A major modification of LLVM'a alias analysis manager has landed in order to port it to the new pass manager. See the commit message for full details. r247167.

• The scalar replacement of aggregates (SROA) pass has been ported to the new pass manager. In the commit message, Chandler comments he hopes this serves as a good example of porting a transformation pass with non-trivial state to the new pass manager. r247501.

• The GlobalsModRef alias analysis pass is now enabled by default. r247264.

• Emacs users, rest your aching pinky fingers for a moment and rejoice. A range of improvements for the Emacs LLVM IR mode have landed. r247281.

• The AArch64 backend can now select STNP, the non-temporal store instruction (this hints that the value need not be kept in cache). r247231.

• Shrink wrapping optimisations are enabled on PPC64. r247237.

• A whole bunch of StringRef functions have been sprinkled with the ALWAYS_INLINE attribute so as to reduce the overhead of string operations even on debug LLVM builds. Chandler has also been making other changes to improve the performance of check-llvm with a debug build. r247253.

• The LLVM performance tips document has been extended to detail the use of allocas and when to specify alignment. r247301.

• The hasLoadLinkedStoreConditional TargetLoweringInformation callback has now been split in to bool shouldExpandAtomicCmpXchgInIR(inst) and AtomicExpansionKind shouldExpandAtomicLoadInIR(inst). r247429.

Clang commits

• A new control-flow integrity variant has been introduced, indirect function call checking (enabled with -fsanitize=cfi-icall). This checks whether the dynamic type of the called function matches the static type used at the call. r247238.

• A new -analyzer-config option is available to modify the size of function that the inliner considers as large. r247463.

• Clang will now try much harder to preserve alignment information during IR-generation. r246985.

• The __builtin_nontemporal_store and __builtin_nontemporal_load builtins have been introduced. r247104, r247374.

Other project commits

• libcxx gained implementations of Boyer-Moore and Boyer-Moore-Horspool searchers (for the language fundamentals technical specification). r247036.

• A trivial dynamic program linked with the new ELF lld now works with musl's dynamic linker. r247290.

• LLD's COFF linker learned to merge cyclic graphs, which means self-linking now produces a 27.7MB rather than a 29.0MB executable. MSVC manages to produce a 27.1MB executable, so there is still room for improvement. r247387.