This gives a small improvement now, and is needed to be able to use the
Heap2Stack transform that's available in the Attributor pass. This
Heap2Stack transform could replace our custom OptimizeAllocs pass.
Most of the changes are just IR that changed, the actual change is
relatively small.
To give an example of why this is useful, here is the code size before
this change:
$ tinygo build -o test -size=short ./testdata/stdlib.go
code data bss | flash ram
95620 1812 968 | 97432 2780
$ tinygo build -o test -size=short ./testdata/stdlib.go
code data bss | flash ram
95380 1812 968 | 97192 2780
That's a 0.25% reduction. Not a whole lot, but nice for such a small
patch.
I found that when I enable ThinLTO, a miscompilation triggers that had
been hidden all the time previously. The bug appears to happen as
follows:
1. TinyGo generates a function with a runtime.trackPointer call, but
without an alloca (or the alloca gets optimized away).
2. LLVM sees that no alloca needs to be kept alive across the
runtime.trackPointer call, and therefore it adds the 'tail' flag.
One of the effects of this flag is that it makes it undefined
behavior to keep allocas alive across the call (which is still safe
at that point).
3. The GC lowering pass adds a stack slot alloca and converts
runtime.trackPointer calls into alloca stores.
The last step triggers the bug: the compiler inserts an alloca where
there was none before but that's not valid as long as the 'tail' flag is
present.
This patch fixes the bug in a somewhat dirty way, by always creating a
dummy alloca so that LLVM won't do the optimization in step 2 (and
possibly other optimizations that rely on there being no alloca
instruction).