This has several advantages, among them:
- Many passes (heap-to-stack, dead arg elimination, inlining) do not
work with function pointer calls. Making them normal function calls
improves their effectiveness.
- Goroutine lowering to LLVM coroutines does not currently support
function pointers. By eliminating function pointers, coroutine
lowering gets support for them for free.
This is especially useful for WebAssembly.
Because of the second point, this work is currently only enabled for the
WebAssembly target.
The icmp instruction is often used in nil checks, so this instruction
happens very frequently now that TinyGo automatically inserts nil checks
everywhere. Escape analysis would conservatively mark such pointers as
escaping, which they obviously don't.
This commit improves escape analysis to allow icmp instructions.
Before this commit, goroutine support was spread through the compiler.
This commit changes this support, so that the compiler itself only
generates simple intrinsics and leaves the real support to a compiler
pass that runs as one of the TinyGo-specific optimization passes.
The biggest change, that was done together with the rewrite, was support
for goroutines in WebAssembly for JavaScript. The challenge in
JavaScript is that in general no blocking operations are allowed, which
means that programs that call time.Sleep() but do not start goroutines
also have to be scheduled by the scheduler.
By running these interprocedural optimizations after interface lowering,
in particular the heap-to-stack transformation pass, interfaces can be
zero cost in some more cases.
For example, say you have the following interface:
type Writer interface {
Write([]byte) (int, error)
}
and you do something with it:
func foo(w io.Writer) {
w.Write([]byte("foo"))
}
this commit enables escape analysis across interface boundaries, which
means that the Write call does not cause an allocation if all
implementations of io.Writer do not let the slice escape. This enables
broader uses of interfaces, as they are now a zero-cost abstraction in
more cases.
This commit changes many things:
* Most interface-related operations are moved into an optimization
pass for more modularity. IR construction creates pseudo-calls which
are lowered in this pass.
* Type codes are assigned in this interface lowering pass, after DCE.
* Type codes are sorted by usage: types more often used in type
asserts are assigned lower numbers to ease jump table construction
during machine code generation.
* Interface assertions are optimized: they are replaced by constant
false, comparison against a constant, or a typeswitch with only
concrete types in the general case.
* Interface calls are replaced with unreachable, direct calls, or a
concrete type switch with direct calls depending on the number of
implementing types. This hopefully makes some interface patterns
zero-cost.
These changes lead to a ~0.5K reduction in code size on Cortex-M for
testdata/interface.go. It appears that a major cause for this is the
replacement of function pointers with direct calls, which are far more
susceptible to optimization. Also, not having a fixed global array of
function pointers greatly helps dead code elimination.
This change also makes future optimizations easier, like optimizations
on interface value comparisons.
Assume any external function won't let pointers live longer than the
call itself. This is true in the vast majority of cases (apparently
everywhere currently) but might not always be true.
TODO: add a //go:noescape (or maybe //go:escape) to handle this, instead
of this assumption.
This optimization makes sure the following pattern doesn't do a heap
allocation (assuming Write doesn't modify the slice):
var w *machine.UART = ...
w.Write([]byte("foo"))
As long as Write doesn't modify the slice and LLVM can detect this, a
call to runtime.stringToBytes with the necessary allocation + copy is
avoided.
