This commit optimizes string literals and globals by setting the
appropriate alignment and using a nil pointer in zero-length strings.
- Setting the alignment for string values has a surprisingly large
effect, up to around 2% in binary size. I suspect that LLVM will
pick some default alignment for larger byte arrays if no alignment
has been specified and forcing an alignment of 1 will pack all
strings closer together.
- Using nil for zero-length strings also has a positive effect, but
I'm not sure why. Perhaps it makes some optimizations more trivial.
- Always setting the alignment on globals improves code size slightly,
probably for the same reasons setting the alignment of string
literals improves code size. The effect is much smaller, however.
This commit might have an effect on performance, but if it does this
should be tested separately and such a large win in binary size should
definitely not be ignored for small embedded systems.
Sometimes, LLVM may rename named structs when merging modules.
Therefore, we can't rely on typecodeID structs to retain their struct
names.
This commit changes the interface lowering pass to not rely on these
names. The interp package does however still rely on this name, but I
hope to fix that in the future.
This commit adds a new transform that converts reflect Implements()
calls to runtime.interfaceImplements. At the moment, the Implements()
method is not yet implemented (how ironic) but if the value passed to
Implements is known at compile time the method call can be optimized to
runtime.interfaceImplements to make it a regular interface assert.
This commit is the last change necessary to add basic support for the
encoding/json package. The json package is certainly not yet fully
supported, but some trivial objects can be converted to JSON.
This is important as golden test output and to verify that the output is
correct. Later improvements and bug fixes are clearly visible in the IR,
and unintentional changes will also be immediately spotted.
An allocated object is never nil, so there is no need for a nil check.
This probably does not result in any better optimization (the nil check
is easily optimized away by LLVM because the result of runtime.alloc is
marked nonnull) but it makes the slice tests a bit cleaner.
This commit switches from the previous behavior of compiling the whole
program at once, to compiling every package in parallel and linking the
LLVM bitcode files together for further whole-program optimization.
This is a small performance win, but it has several advantages in the
future:
- There are many more things that can be done per package in parallel,
avoiding the bottleneck at the end of the compiler phase. This
should speed up the compiler futher.
- This change is a necessary step towards a non-LTO build mode for
fast incremental builds that only rebuild the changed package, when
compiler speed is more important than binary size.
- This change refactors the compiler in such a way that it will be
easier to inspect the IR for one package only. Inspecting this IR
will be very helpful for compiler developers.
This commit finally introduces unit tests for the compiler, to check
whether input Go code is converted to the expected output IR.
To make this necessary, a few refactors were needed. Hopefully these
refactors (to compile a program package by package instead of all at
once) will eventually become standard, so that packages can all be
compiled separate from each other and be cached between compiles.
