So I've been using LLVM for about 4 years now, and I've posted a lot on this list about specific issues. What I would like to do is step back for a moment and give my "big picture" assessment of LLVM overall, particularly with respect to developing a "managed" language like Java / C# or my own language, Tart. Obviously, I feel that LLVM is the best choice out there, otherwise I would of switched to using other alternatives long ago. At the same time, however, I've observed that the great majority of experimental languages - Groovy, Scala, and many others - are built on top of the Java virtual machine, which seems to be the platform of choice for language experimenters. In a similar vein, if you spend any time studying the academic research on garbage collection algorithms, you'll see that the JVM also appears to be the platform of choice here as well. One question to ask is, what factors would weigh heavily in the decision to choose the JVM over LLVM when implementing a managed language? On the positive side, LLVM's mature and simple APIs make it a breeze to manipulate types and functions, and it's modular architecture means I can use the parts I want without being forced to use parts I don't need. And the ability to go straight to machine code means that I don't need to ship a complex virtual machine with my executables. I would also like to list the areas where I *don't need help* from LLVM - that is, these are things I can easily handle myself in the frontend: - Dynamic dispatch and virtual methods / multi-methods - Boxing and unboxing of value types - Reflection - Memory management I mention these items for two reasons: First, because these are services that *would* be provided by a JVM, and I want people to know that the lack of these items in LLVM does not in any way count as a detriment. And secondly, because I've occasionally heard people on this list ask for features like these, and I think it would be a waste of time to spend effort implementing something that the frontend can easily handle. Next, I want to list the areas where I think LLVM is lacking: The first issue is more of a community-related one, which is that IMHO LLVM doesn't have a lot of forward momentum in the experimental languages space. The vast majority of contributions to the LLVM code base fall into three categories: Clang-related work, ports to new backends, and optimization research. Parts of LLVM which don't fall into these categories - like garbage collection for example - tend to languish. Note that this is not a criticism, but merely an observation - if it were a criticism I'd have to blame myself as much as anyone else. There are good reasons why things are as they are - the few people like myself who are working on non-C-like languages generally don't have the energy to both work on their front ends and at the same time do any serious amount of work on the LLVM infrastructure. (You all saw what happened with the union types fiasco - I contributed all of the front-end parts for declaring and serializing unions, in the hopes that someone more knowledgeable would pick up the effort of implementing them on the code generation side - but that never happened and the feature got removed after six months of no progress.) I think that LLVM's best hope in this department is that one of these experimental languages becomes popular enough to attract a serious contributor base of it's own, and that some of that effort can bleed off into improving LLVM. Some of that was actually starting to happen in the case of unladen-swallow, before that project was shut down. The rest of my issues are more specific: *Garbage collection is still way too difficult*. The biggest problem is the inability to track SSA values - it requires the frontend to generate very inefficient and error-prone code, manually spilling SSA values to the stack around nearly every function call. I've written proposals for improving the situation, which I won't repeat here - but realistically there's no way that I am ever going to have time learn to enough about LLVM's code generation passes to implement something like this myself. Another area which I'd like to see supported is stack walking - that is, starting from the current call frame, iterate through all of the call frames above it. Currently the only way to do this is via platform-specific assembly language - I'd think it would be relatively simple to make an intrinsic that does this. (Note that the current stack intrinsics are unusable, because they are (a) unreliable, and (b) inefficient. Taking an integer index of a stack frame as a parameter is not the right way to do it.) I have to say, if there's any single issue that could make me give up on LLVM and switch over to using something like a JVM, it would be this - because as far as I can tell, LLVM's garbage collection features are in exactly the same state they were in when I started working with LLVM four years ago. *Generating debug info* is another area which is very hard to use. The new DIBuilder class was a significant improvement, but the whole area is still very complex, it's extremely easy to make mistakes and then spend days or weeks trying to figure out what went wrong - there's no type safety or validation that can prevent you from making such mistakes. Over the last 4 years I've spent many man-months of time wrestling with DWARF. (One also wonders if DWARF is even the right answer. Especially compared to the JVM - the Java debuggers are able to derive much of their information from the reflection and class metadata that's already there in the class files, so from that perspective DWARF adds a huge amount of overhead.) *Platform ABI limitations* - Currently LLVM requires the frontend developer to know quite a lot about the platform ABI - for example whether you are allowed to pass a struct of a certain size as a value type rather than as a reference. The thing is, experimental languages like mine generally don't care so much about ABI compatibility - sure, we'd like to be able to call C library functions once in a while (and we don't mind doing the extra work in those cases), but most of the time we just want to pass a data type around and expect it to work. Requiring the use of different techniques on different platforms makes the situation considerably more complex. *Light-weight coroutines* would be a "nice to have", as would better *concurrency primitives*. These are things I could do on my own, but it would be better, I think, to have them in LLVM - because in my view of the world, anything that requires lots of architecture-specific knowledge ideally belongs on the LLVM side of the line. There's been a lot of discussion about divide-by-zero errors and other *non-declared exceptions*. Having this available would be a great help. *Named structure types* - as per Chris's proposal - would be a major simplification, as it would allow declaration of pointer fields without having to import the code that defines the structure of the thing that the pointer is pointing to. Anyway that's pretty much my list of big-ticket items. As you can see, anyone who cares about these issues would have to think very hard before choosing LLVM over the JVM as an implementation platform. -- -- Talin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20110701/e6f6eba9/attachment.html>
Hi Talin, I have some questions below. If these topics have already been discussed in earlier threads, kindly point me there. I'm aware of your GC proposal, but the rest is new to me. On Jul 1, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Talin wrote:> Garbage collection is still way too difficult. The biggest problem is the inability to track SSA values - it requires the frontend to generate very inefficient and error-prone code, manually spilling SSA values to the stack around nearly every function call. I've written proposals for improving the situation, which I won't repeat here - but realistically there's no way that I am ever going to have time learn to enough about LLVM's code generation passes to implement something like this myself. > > Another area which I'd like to see supported is stack walking - that is, starting from the current call frame, iterate through all of the call frames above it. Currently the only way to do this is via platform-specific assembly language - I'd think it would be relatively simple to make an intrinsic that does this. (Note that the current stack intrinsics are unusable, because they are (a) unreliable, and (b) inefficient. Taking an integer index of a stack frame as a parameter is not the right way to do it.) > > I have to say, if there's any single issue that could make me give up on LLVM and switch over to using something like a JVM, it would be this - because as far as I can tell, LLVM's garbage collection features are in exactly the same state they were in when I started working with LLVM four years ago.JVM implementers have done a lot of work in their respective compiler backend to support moving collectors. I'm not aware of any efficient solution short of making the backend aware of object pointer types. i.e. Machine operands need to carry these types. For stack walking, what do you need in addition to DWARF unwind? Or is generating correct unwind tables the problem? I'm not sure what stack intrinsics you mean... returnaddress and frameaddress? They don't always work if you provide the necessary target options? It almost sounds like you want more control than libunwind provides? Or do you want more efficiency?> Light-weight coroutines would be a "nice to have", as would better concurrency primitives.This could be interesting. Can you explain in more detail or just point me to some examples?> There's been a lot of discussion about divide-by-zero errors and other non-declared exceptions. Having this available would be a great help.What is a non-declared exception (no throw statement in the source code?), and do you think something is missing from LLVM IR? I don't see any difficulty expressing Java/C# exceptions in LLVM IR. Do you want to build high-level language semantics into LLVM IR to avoid duplicating effort across Java/C#/Tart frontends? Or do you want better optimization/codegen in these cases (language-friendly backend)? Keep in mind that adding higher level IR constructs only inhibits optimization. Java bytecode bakes language semantics into opcodes as a compression technique. It's not a form that is amenable to optimization. Maybe what you really want is a managed language toolkit for use in frontends such as yours? Backing up now to the overall topic, which of these general themes fits your experience: 1) You want more efficient support for implementing advanced runtime features for a given target 2) You want more ABI abstraction for easier porting across a range of targets -Andy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20110701/824d9bb0/attachment.html>
On Jul 1, 2011, at 4:41 PM, Andrew Trick wrote:> Java bytecode bakes language semantics into opcodes as a compression technique. It's not a form that is amenable to optimization.I mispoke slightly. "compressing" the bytecode is as much an interpreter performance optimization as it is an I/O optimization. By "not amenable to optimization" I meant high level bytecode is not a suitable IR for an optimizing compiler. I just assumed you're not developing an interpreted language. If so, then develop your own bytecode or use the JVM :) -Andy
On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Andrew Trick <atrick at apple.com> wrote:> Hi Talin, > > I have some questions below. If these topics have already been discussed in > earlier threads, kindly point me there. I'm aware of your GC proposal, but > the rest is new to me. > > On Jul 1, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Talin wrote: > > *Garbage collection is still way too difficult*. The biggest problem is > the inability to track SSA values - it requires the frontend to generate > very inefficient and error-prone code, manually spilling SSA values to the > stack around nearly every function call. I've written proposals for > improving the situation, which I won't repeat here - but realistically > there's no way that I am ever going to have time learn to enough about > LLVM's code generation passes to implement something like this myself. > > Another area which I'd like to see supported is stack walking - that is, > starting from the current call frame, iterate through all of the call frames > above it. Currently the only way to do this is via platform-specific > assembly language - I'd think it would be relatively simple to make an > intrinsic that does this. (Note that the current stack intrinsics are > unusable, because they are (a) unreliable, and (b) inefficient. Taking an > integer index of a stack frame as a parameter is not the right way to do > it.) > > I have to say, if there's any single issue that could make me give up on > LLVM and switch over to using something like a JVM, it would be this - > because as far as I can tell, LLVM's garbage collection features are in > exactly the same state they were in when I started working with LLVM four > years ago. > > > JVM implementers have done a lot of work in their respective compiler > backend to support moving collectors. I'm not aware of any efficient > solution short of making the backend aware of object pointer types. i.e. > Machine operands need to carry these types. > > So, I have a working implementation of a moving collector that uses theLLVM intrinsics. This consists of three components: - My frontend code that tells LLVM which data values contain traceable roots. - My custom GCStrategy class which uses information about the roots to generate a stack map for every function identifying the relative offset of each root. - My runtime library which traverses those stack maps. All of this is pretty standard stuff. What's nice about it is that LLVM doesn't really need to know any of the details of my garbage collection algorithm, or even what a root looks like - I'm sure you saw my earlier discussion of discriminated unions as roots, where the collector needs access to the discriminator field to determine whether the payload is a pointer or not. Since the llvm.gcroot intrinsic causes the root to be passed to the strategy with no assumptions about its internal structure, that gives me a lot of flexibility. For having SSA values as roots, the situation is obviously more complex. One simplifying assumption is that we don't try and trace register values directly (because a structure may have been 'sliced' into multiple registers and it would be hard for the GCStrategy to handle that), but rather do what we do now and say that the collector can only trace objects which live in memory. Thus, we still need to spill SSA values into memory and reload them - but that work should be done by LLVM and not by the frontend, because LLVM has far more detailed knowledge of value lifetimes. The other hard bit is how to 'mark' arbitrary values as roots. Right now values are marked using the llvm.gcroot intrinsics, but that only works on allocas. My current thinking is that we add a second bit to the "Struct" type (the first bit being isPacked) called "isRoot". If you want to declare a pointer as a root, then wrap it in a struct having that bit set - so you have to add an extra 0 into your GEP to get the value out, but that's trivial. Since a struct can contain any other data type, it makes it easy to create roots having any desired structure. Again, these get communicated from the frontend to the strategy pass without interpretation by LLVM, except for one stipulation, which is that the structure isn't 'sliced', that the offset given to the strategy pass points to a complete copy of the struct.> For stack walking, what do you need in addition to DWARF unwind? Or is > generating correct unwind tables the problem? I'm not sure what stack > intrinsics you mean... returnaddress and frameaddress? They don't always > work if you provide the necessary target options? It almost sounds like you > want more control than libunwind provides? Or do you want more efficiency? > > Here's what my stack walker for x86 platforms looks like now:struct CallFrame { CallFrame * prevFrame; void * returnAddr; }; void GC_traceStack(tart_object * traceAction) { CallFrame * framePtr; #if _MSC_VER #if SIZEOF_VOID_PTR == 4 __asm { mov framePtr, ebp } #else __asm { mov framePtr, rbp } #endif #else #if SIZEOF_VOID_PTR == 4 __asm__("movl %%ebp, %0" :"=r"(framePtr)); #else __asm__("movq %%rbp, %0" :"=r"(framePtr)); #endif #endif while (framePtr != NULL) { void * returnAddr = framePtr->returnAddr; framePtr = framePtr->prevFrame; TraceDescriptor * tdesc = GC_lookupStackFrameDesc(returnAddr); if (tdesc != NULL) { TraceAction_traceDescriptors(traceAction, (void *)framePtr, tdesc); } } } Basically it gets the bp register as a pointer, and treats it as the head of a linked list. It iterates through the list nodes until it finds NULL. For each node, it finds the return address (which is stored next to the node pointer), and looks that up in a map which returns the stack frame descriptor for that function. As you can see this is extremely simple and fast. If I were designing a set of llvm intrinsics to replicate this, I would have three functions: llvm.callframe.current() simply returns the value of the bp register; llvm.callframe.next() takes the address of the previous stack frame and returns its parent; and llvm.callframe.returnaddress() takes the address of a call frame and returns the associated return address. These three intrinsics should (I hope) be implementable on any platform that LLVM targets, and would (I would think) each lower into a single instruction. This would avoid me having to have a different set of inline assembly for each different processor family that LLVM supports.> *Light-weight coroutines* would be a "nice to have", as would better *concurrency > primitives*. > > > This could be interesting. Can you explain in more detail or just point me > to some examples? > > I'm thinking of the kind of things that Go or IBM's X10 language does, orpossibly Python's generators. Each language is of course going to create its own model of concurrency, but that model is going to be created from lower-level primitives that are either provided by LLVM (things like stack-swapping and thread-local variables) or provided by the various operating system libraries (thread creation and semaphores and such.)> There's been a lot of discussion about divide-by-zero errors and other *non-declared > exceptions*. Having this available would be a great help. > > What is a non-declared exception (no throw statement in the source code?), > and do you think something is missing from LLVM IR? I don't see any > difficulty expressing Java/C# exceptions in LLVM IR. Do you want to build > high-level language semantics into LLVM IR to avoid duplicating effort > across Java/C#/Tart frontends? Or do you want better optimization/codegen in > these cases (language-friendly backend)? > > There's been several threads on this lately, and I am by no means an expertin this area, but I do understand that the basic problem of jumping out from the middle of a basic block is a hard one to solve - but I would like to see it solved. I can work with whatever solution you guys come up with.> Keep in mind that adding higher level IR constructs only inhibits > optimization. Java bytecode bakes language semantics into opcodes as a > compression technique. It's not a form that is amenable to optimization. > > Maybe what you really want is a managed language toolkit for use in > frontends such as yours? > > Backing up now to the overall topic, which of these general themes fits > your experience: > 1) You want more efficient support for implementing advanced runtime > features for a given target > 2) You want more ABI abstraction for easier porting across a range of > targets > > I think #2 is more interesting to me. It's not hard to do #1 for a givenplatform, as there are libraries a-plenty to do most of this stuff. Think of it this way: The name of the project is LLVM: "Low-Level Virtual Machine". I realize that's a bit of a misnomer, in that LLVM isn't primarily about executing code, but more about preparing code for execution. (I suppose we could call it LLISEE - Low Level Instruction Set and Execution Environment - but that's a mouthful. You could also call it LLVVM - Low Level "Virtual" Virtual Machine, in that the VM doesn't actually exist). But the "VM" part of the name seems to imply that it's not just a compiler, but a framework for execution and for building environments in which execution happens. -Andy -- -- Talin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20110701/74ea83a5/attachment.html>
Hi Talin, Interesting post, On Jul 1, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Talin wrote:> Garbage collection is still way too difficult. The biggest problem is the inability to track SSA values - it requires the> Light-weight coroutines would be a "nice to have", as would better concurrency primitives. These are things I couldTackling the "still way too difficult" and "should be more batteries included" aspects of your post, I think that there is a lot of room for an LLVM subproject that provides a "language implementors toolbox" in the form of some really well documented and standardized runtime libraries that provide GC, synchronization, etc capabilities. Having them available and reusable (and sub-settable!) would allow code sharing across a wide range of different llvm language implementation. These are the capabilities that the JVM provides languages implemented on top of it, and are clearly useful. Of course the power of LLVM is that it doesn't force you to use a *particular* set of synch primitives, a particular memory management scheme, etc. However, that doesn't mean that we can't provide a toolbox of parts to choose from, just like we provide a standard optimization sequence which clients can choose to use or not. -Chris -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20110703/7afde528/attachment.html>
On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 9:07 AM, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:> Hi Talin, > > Interesting post, > > On Jul 1, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Talin wrote: > > *Garbage collection is still way too difficult*. The biggest problem is > the inability to track SSA values - it requires the > > > *Light-weight coroutines* would be a "nice to have", as would better *concurrency > primitives*. These are things I could > > > Tackling the "still way too difficult" and "should be more batteries > included" aspects of your post, I think that there is a lot of room for an > LLVM subproject that provides a "language implementors toolbox" in the form > of some really well documented and standardized runtime libraries that > provide GC, synchronization, etc capabilities. Having them available and > reusable (and sub-settable!) would allow code sharing across a wide range of > different llvm language implementation. > > Well, sort of. Things like GC tracing of SSA values can't really be done asa library, i'm assuming it requires changes to the code generator. Things like iterating stack frames can be done as an add-on library, but I think they would work better as intrinsics - which again requires changes to the code generators. Things like stack switching could go either way I guess. Most of the things that *could* go in an add-on library I could write myself. The primary exception is cases where the library code has to be different for each target platform - in such cases what you'd really like is for each different platform-specific implementation to have a maintainer who is an expert on that platform. This is not to say that such a library as you propose would not be useful and convenient. Of course, I'm assuming that the typical language implementor has skills and needs similar to my own, which might not be true. In general, I try to be an expert on the first half of the dragon book, and leave the second half to experts who know far more than I do.> These are the capabilities that the JVM provides languages implemented on > top of it, and are clearly useful. Of course the power of LLVM is that it > doesn't force you to use a *particular* set of synch primitives, a > particular memory management scheme, etc. However, that doesn't mean that > we can't provide a toolbox of parts to choose from, just like we provide a > standard optimization sequence which clients can choose to use or not. > > -Chris >-- -- Talin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20110704/c4ea0d76/attachment.html>
On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 9:07 AM, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:> Hi Talin, > > Interesting post, > > On Jul 1, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Talin wrote: > > *Garbage collection is still way too difficult*. The biggest problem is > the inability to track SSA values - it requires the > > > *Light-weight coroutines* would be a "nice to have", as would better *concurrency > primitives*. These are things I could > > > Tackling the "still way too difficult" and "should be more batteries > included" aspects of your post, I think that there is a lot of room for an > LLVM subproject that provides a "language implementors toolbox" in the form > of some really well documented and standardized runtime libraries that > provide GC, synchronization, etc capabilities. Having them available and > reusable (and sub-settable!) would allow code sharing across a wide range of > different llvm language implementation. > > A few additional thoughts: The language implementer's library that youpropose would include a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't mention in the original post because it's stuff that I already have, but which might be useful to other language implementers. Some examples: - DWARF exception table decoding functions, useful for writing personality functions. - Other functions for accessing DWARF data at runtime - useful for generating stack dumps. - Aligned memory allocators. It's useful for some garbage collection algorithms to be able to allocate heap blocks that are aligned on a large power-of-two boundary (like 64K boundary) so that you can quickly determine which memory pool an address belongs to by looking at the upper bits of the address. (Mainly this would just be a standardized interface around the platform's C library functions that do this, such as posix_memalign.) - An efficient map class for mapping function return addresses to a pointer. This map would be initialized on program start from a table of tuples and would be immutable after that. One use of this is finding the stack map for a given function return address. - Integer/float parsing and printing functions for building your language's equivalent of 'printf'. - Helper functions for finding and running static constructors. - Getting and setting thread-local data in a way that uses the __thread attribute if available, and pthreads if not. (I notice that pthread_getspecific is extremely efficient on OS X.) - Low-level debugging support. One requirement is that all of these functions should be written in such as way as to not require the C++ runtime libraries, only C libs. These are the capabilities that the JVM provides languages implemented on> top of it, and are clearly useful. Of course the power of LLVM is that it > doesn't force you to use a *particular* set of synch primitives, a > particular memory management scheme, etc. However, that doesn't mean that > we can't provide a toolbox of parts to choose from, just like we provide a > standard optimization sequence which clients can choose to use or not. > > -Chris >-- -- Talin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20110705/28534ba8/attachment.html>
On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 11:05:44AM -0700, Talin said> So I've been using LLVM for about 4 years now, and I've posted a lot on this > list about specific issues. What I would like to do is step back for a > moment and give my "big picture" assessment of LLVM overall, particularly > with respect to developing a "managed" language like Java / C# or my own > language, Tart.I'm working on an LLVM backend for the Scala compiler[1], so I'm very interested in the issues you discuss here. Some of them I have encountered myself already and others I can see on the horizon. I am new to the list and offer apologies and request pointers if I cover ground that's been trodden before. [1] http://greedy.github.com/scala/> I would also like to list the areas where I *don't need help* from LLVM - > that is, these are things I can easily handle myself in the frontend: > > - Dynamic dispatch and virtual methods / multi-methods > - Boxing and unboxing of value types > - Reflection > - Memory management > > I mention these items for two reasons: First, because these are services > that *would* be provided by a JVM, and I want people to know that the lack > of these items in LLVM does not in any way count as a detriment. And > secondly, because I've occasionally heard people on this list ask for > features like these, and I think it would be a waste of time to spend effort > implementing something that the frontend can easily handle.Agree 100%.> The rest of my issues are more specific: > > *Garbage collection is still way too difficult*. The biggest problem is the > inability to track SSA values - it requires the frontend to generate very > inefficient and error-prone code, manually spilling SSA values to the stack > around nearly every function call. I've written proposals for improving the > situation, which I won't repeat here - but realistically there's no way that > I am ever going to have time learn to enough about LLVM's code generation > passes to implement something like this myself.I'd appreciate a pointer to the previous proposal and discussion. I assume that you're talking about automatic spilling of SSA roots to stack slots at safe points? Is it possible that you could attach metadata to these SSA values and generate the appropriate LLVM IR to spill all the values that dominate the safe point in the GC strategy?> Another area which I'd like to see supported is stack walking - that is, > starting from the current call frame, iterate through all of the call frames > above it. Currently the only way to do this is via platform-specific > assembly language - I'd think it would be relatively simple to make an > intrinsic that does this. (Note that the current stack intrinsics are > unusable, because they are (a) unreliable, and (b) inefficient. Taking an > integer index of a stack frame as a parameter is not the right way to do > it.)Do you have something in mind similar to the interface provided by libunwind (http://www.nongnu.org/libunwind/docs.html) but lighter weight and integrated with LLVM?> I have to say, if there's any single issue that could make me give up on > LLVM and switch over to using something like a JVM, it would be this - > because as far as I can tell, LLVM's garbage collection features are in > exactly the same state they were in when I started working with LLVM four > years ago.In my mind one of the frustrations trying to use the GC support in LLVM is the somewhat sketchy documentation. I'd be nice to have a straightforward end-to-end example. Since you've implemented a GC using this support maybe you could write something up. I know I'd appreciate it a lot. Do you find that the status table in the GC document is still accurate? It seems like the features you'd like to see implemented most here are - Emitting code at safe points - Register maps - Liveness analysis (it appears that the new lifetime intrinsics may enable this)> *Platform ABI limitations* - Currently LLVM requires the frontend developer > to know quite a lot about the platform ABI - for example whether you are > allowed to pass a struct of a certain size as a value type rather than as a > reference. The thing is, experimental languages like mine generally don't > care so much about ABI compatibility - sure, we'd like to be able to call C > library functions once in a while (and we don't mind doing the extra work in > those cases), but most of the time we just want to pass a data type around > and expect it to work. Requiring the use of different techniques on > different platforms makes the situation considerably more complex.Is it reasonable to add a new calling convention that like fastcc doesn't need to worry about conforming to any ABI but instead of trying to go fast, provides maximum flexibility?> *Light-weight coroutines* would be a "nice to have", as would better > *concurrency > primitives*. These are things I could do on my own, but it would be better, > I think, to have them in LLVM - because in my view of the world, anything > that requires lots of architecture-specific knowledge ideally belongs on the > LLVM side of the line. > > There's been a lot of discussion about divide-by-zero errors and other > *non-declared > exceptions*. Having this available would be a great help.Agreed. I have read some of the proposals about this and it does indeed seem tricky. At the least the instructions that could raise an exception would have to be marked in some way so that side-affecting code isn't moved past them.> *Named structure types* - as per Chris's proposal - would be a major > simplification, as it would allow declaration of pointer fields without > having to import the code that defines the structure of the thing that the > pointer is pointing to.I would really like to see this. It would also help when inspecting IR. Right now if types have been uniqued all structures with the same layout get collapsed to a single name which makes things awkward to read. -- Geoff
On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Geoff Reedy <geoff at programmer-monk.net>wrote:> On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 11:05:44AM -0700, Talin said > > So I've been using LLVM for about 4 years now, and I've posted a lot on > this > > list about specific issues. What I would like to do is step back for a > > moment and give my "big picture" assessment of LLVM overall, particularly > > with respect to developing a "managed" language like Java / C# or my own > > language, Tart. > > I'm working on an LLVM backend for the Scala compiler[1], so I'm very > interested in the issues you discuss here. Some of them I have > encountered myself already and others I can see on the horizon. I am new > to the list and offer apologies and request pointers if I cover ground > that's been trodden before. > > [1] http://greedy.github.com/scala/ > > > I would also like to list the areas where I *don't need help* from LLVM - > > that is, these are things I can easily handle myself in the frontend: > > > > - Dynamic dispatch and virtual methods / multi-methods > > - Boxing and unboxing of value types > > - Reflection > > - Memory management > > > > I mention these items for two reasons: First, because these are services > > that *would* be provided by a JVM, and I want people to know that the > lack > > of these items in LLVM does not in any way count as a detriment. And > > secondly, because I've occasionally heard people on this list ask for > > features like these, and I think it would be a waste of time to spend > effort > > implementing something that the frontend can easily handle. > > Agree 100%. > > > The rest of my issues are more specific: > > > > *Garbage collection is still way too difficult*. The biggest problem is > the > > inability to track SSA values - it requires the frontend to generate very > > inefficient and error-prone code, manually spilling SSA values to the > stack > > around nearly every function call. I've written proposals for improving > the > > situation, which I won't repeat here - but realistically there's no way > that > > I am ever going to have time learn to enough about LLVM's code generation > > passes to implement something like this myself. > > I'd appreciate a pointer to the previous proposal and discussion. I > assume that you're talking about automatic spilling of SSA roots to > stack slots at safe points? Is it possible that you could attach > metadata to these SSA values and generate the appropriate LLVM IR to > spill all the values that dominate the safe point in the GC strategy? > > Actually, my ideas have changed somewhat, so I'll start a new thread withthe most recent incarnation.> > Another area which I'd like to see supported is stack walking - that is, > > starting from the current call frame, iterate through all of the call > frames > > above it. Currently the only way to do this is via platform-specific > > assembly language - I'd think it would be relatively simple to make an > > intrinsic that does this. (Note that the current stack intrinsics are > > unusable, because they are (a) unreliable, and (b) inefficient. Taking an > > integer index of a stack frame as a parameter is not the right way to do > > it.) > > Do you have something in mind similar to the interface provided by > libunwind (http://www.nongnu.org/libunwind/docs.html) but lighter weight > and integrated with LLVM? > > You're in luck - I happen to have a document that explains this very thing:https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1-ws0KYo47S0CgqpwkjfWDBJ8wFhW_0UYKxPIJ0TyKrQ> I have to say, if there's any single issue that could make me give up on > > LLVM and switch over to using something like a JVM, it would be this - > > because as far as I can tell, LLVM's garbage collection features are in > > exactly the same state they were in when I started working with LLVM four > > years ago. > > In my mind one of the frustrations trying to use the GC support in LLVM > is the somewhat sketchy documentation. I'd be nice to have a > straightforward end-to-end example. Since you've implemented a GC using > this support maybe you could write something up. I know I'd appreciate > it a lot. Do you find that the status table in the GC document is still > accurate? It seems like the features you'd like to see implemented most > here are > > - Emitting code at safe points > - Register maps > - Liveness analysis (it appears that the new lifetime intrinsics may > enable this) > > > *Platform ABI limitations* - Currently LLVM requires the frontend > developer > > to know quite a lot about the platform ABI - for example whether you are > > allowed to pass a struct of a certain size as a value type rather than as > a > > reference. The thing is, experimental languages like mine generally don't > > care so much about ABI compatibility - sure, we'd like to be able to call > C > > library functions once in a while (and we don't mind doing the extra work > in > > those cases), but most of the time we just want to pass a data type > around > > and expect it to work. Requiring the use of different techniques on > > different platforms makes the situation considerably more complex. > > Is it reasonable to add a new calling convention that like fastcc > doesn't need to worry about conforming to any ABI but instead of trying > to go fast, provides maximum flexibility? > > I'll have to defer to the experts on this one.> > *Light-weight coroutines* would be a "nice to have", as would better > > *concurrency > > primitives*. These are things I could do on my own, but it would be > better, > > I think, to have them in LLVM - because in my view of the world, anything > > that requires lots of architecture-specific knowledge ideally belongs on > the > > LLVM side of the line. > > > > There's been a lot of discussion about divide-by-zero errors and other > > *non-declared > > exceptions*. Having this available would be a great help. > > Agreed. I have read some of the proposals about this and it does indeed > seem tricky. At the least the instructions that could raise an exception > would have to be marked in some way so that side-affecting code isn't > moved past them. > > There have been a couple of proposals put forward, but nothing hasmaterialized yet. Here is one: http://code.google.com/p/llvm-stack-switch/wiki/Proposal There's also this thread: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/38987> > *Named structure types* - as per Chris's proposal - would be a major > > simplification, as it would allow declaration of pointer fields without > > having to import the code that defines the structure of the thing that > the > > pointer is pointing to. > > I would really like to see this. It would also help when inspecting IR. > Right now if types have been uniqued all structures with the same layout > get collapsed to a single name which makes things awkward to read. > > Yep!> -- Geoff > _______________________________________________ > LLVM Developers mailing list > LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu > http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev >-- -- Talin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20110706/88114ee9/attachment.html>
Hi Talin, I wrote HLVM: http://www.ffconsultancy.com/ocaml/hlvm/ The whole project took a few man months. HLVM provides an ML-like type system, unboxed tuples, discriminated unions, TCO, generic printing, C FFI, POSIX threads, mark-sweep GC and both JIT and standalone compilation. I wrote several (accurate) garbage collectors for it including a stop-the-world mark-sweep collector and they took a few days each. I did so by implementing my own shadow stack along the lines of Henderson's "Accurate garbage collection in an uncooperative environment". HLVM was only ever a hobby project. IMHO, the results were incredible and are a testament to the awesomeness of LLVM. HLVM prototyped many interesting ideas but the most relevant here is the use of value types to avoid heap allocation in order to alleviate the garbage collector. For example, HLVM is about 3x faster than Java on the following ray tracing benchmark because HLVM does no allocation or collection whilst tracing whereas Java does a huge amount: http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/hlvm-on-ray-tracer-language-comparison.html I believe that benchmark shows that even the most heavily optimized GC can be thrashed by a program that simply avoids GC. Value types make this possible and the lack of value types on the JVM is, therefore, a major issue. Now, I have some concerns about the statements being made here regarding GC support in LLVM. Let me begin by addressing the statement:> Garbage collection is still way too difficult.This is completely untrue. You can easily write your own GC simply by storing roots explicitly in your own shadow stack. Contrary to what many people told me before I did this, performance is fine for many applications: http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/current-shadow-stack-overheads-in-hlvm.html I believe the conclusion you meant to draw is that writing a GC using LLVM's highly experimental GC support is way too difficult but that is a very different statement. This is a really important point because it means that all of the major changes discussed so far are just optimizations beyond a simple shadow stack. Moreover, I don't think we have any idea how valuable these optimizations might be. Therefore, I think this discussion needs to start with an objective survey of the possible approaches and some performance estimates. HLVM's benchmarks indicate that the shadow stack overhead is usually under 20% but can be as high as 70% with purely functional code. HLVM currently pushes all roots onto the shadow stack as soon as they come into scope and resets the shadow stack pointer at each function exit. A better approach would be to defer pushing until safe points (if any) and push only live roots (i.e. those referred to again after the safe point). I believe HLVM could attain competitive performance even on purely functional data structures by using a non-moving mark-region collector. I have written several prototypes in C++ but they are very much work-in-progress. As the GCs are non-moving there is no need to restore pointers after a safe point, which sounds more efficient to me. The downside is that temporaries are no longer allocated by bumping a pointer into the nursery generation but my mark-region GC uses a small bitwise LUT to find the next free block in the current region which is almost as fast. Others have said that the best possible performance is obtained by making the back-end aware of GC pointers. I can well believe that but the cost of doing so with LLVM is so large that I think it will be necessary to sacrifice optimality for something almost as good that is attainable with a lot less effort. In fact, I would much rather see a separate project that sits on top of LLVM and provides a safe high-level garbage collected VM for language experimenters to use. Incidentally, if anyone wants to get up to speed on GC design I highly recommend Richard Jones' new book on the subject: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Garbage-Collection-Handbook-Management-Algorithms/dp/1420082795 Cheers, Jon. From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of Talin Sent: 01 July 2011 19:06 To: LLVM Developers Mailing List Subject: [LLVMdev] LLVM and managed languages So I've been using LLVM for about 4 years now, and I've posted a lot on this list about specific issues. What I would like to do is step back for a moment and give my "big picture" assessment of LLVM overall, particularly with respect to developing a "managed" language like Java / C# or my own language, Tart. Obviously, I feel that LLVM is the best choice out there, otherwise I would of switched to using other alternatives long ago. At the same time, however, I've observed that the great majority of experimental languages - Groovy, Scala, and many others - are built on top of the Java virtual machine, which seems to be the platform of choice for language experimenters. In a similar vein, if you spend any time studying the academic research on garbage collection algorithms, you'll see that the JVM also appears to be the platform of choice here as well. One question to ask is, what factors would weigh heavily in the decision to choose the JVM over LLVM when implementing a managed language? On the positive side, LLVM's mature and simple APIs make it a breeze to manipulate types and functions, and it's modular architecture means I can use the parts I want without being forced to use parts I don't need. And the ability to go straight to machine code means that I don't need to ship a complex virtual machine with my executables. I would also like to list the areas where I don't need help from LLVM - that is, these are things I can easily handle myself in the frontend: • Dynamic dispatch and virtual methods / multi-methods • Boxing and unboxing of value types • Reflection • Memory management I mention these items for two reasons: First, because these are services that would be provided by a JVM, and I want people to know that the lack of these items in LLVM does not in any way count as a detriment. And secondly, because I've occasionally heard people on this list ask for features like these, and I think it would be a waste of time to spend effort implementing something that the frontend can easily handle. Next, I want to list the areas where I think LLVM is lacking: The first issue is more of a community-related one, which is that IMHO LLVM doesn't have a lot of forward momentum in the experimental languages space. The vast majority of contributions to the LLVM code base fall into three categories: Clang-related work, ports to new backends, and optimization research. Parts of LLVM which don't fall into these categories - like garbage collection for example - tend to languish. Note that this is not a criticism, but merely an observation - if it were a criticism I'd have to blame myself as much as anyone else. There are good reasons why things are as they are - the few people like myself who are working on non-C-like languages generally don't have the energy to both work on their front ends and at the same time do any serious amount of work on the LLVM infrastructure. (You all saw what happened with the union types fiasco - I contributed all of the front-end parts for declaring and serializing unions, in the hopes that someone more knowledgeable would pick up the effort of implementing them on the code generation side - but that never happened and the feature got removed after six months of no progress.) I think that LLVM's best hope in this department is that one of these experimental languages becomes popular enough to attract a serious contributor base of it's own, and that some of that effort can bleed off into improving LLVM. Some of that was actually starting to happen in the case of unladen-swallow, before that project was shut down. The rest of my issues are more specific: Garbage collection is still way too difficult. The biggest problem is the inability to track SSA values - it requires the frontend to generate very inefficient and error-prone code, manually spilling SSA values to the stack around nearly every function call. I've written proposals for improving the situation, which I won't repeat here - but realistically there's no way that I am ever going to have time learn to enough about LLVM's code generation passes to implement something like this myself. Another area which I'd like to see supported is stack walking - that is, starting from the current call frame, iterate through all of the call frames above it. Currently the only way to do this is via platform-specific assembly language - I'd think it would be relatively simple to make an intrinsic that does this. (Note that the current stack intrinsics are unusable, because they are (a) unreliable, and (b) inefficient. Taking an integer index of a stack frame as a parameter is not the right way to do it.) I have to say, if there's any single issue that could make me give up on LLVM and switch over to using something like a JVM, it would be this - because as far as I can tell, LLVM's garbage collection features are in exactly the same state they were in when I started working with LLVM four years ago. Generating debug info is another area which is very hard to use. The new DIBuilder class was a significant improvement, but the whole area is still very complex, it's extremely easy to make mistakes and then spend days or weeks trying to figure out what went wrong - there's no type safety or validation that can prevent you from making such mistakes. Over the last 4 years I've spent many man-months of time wrestling with DWARF. (One also wonders if DWARF is even the right answer. Especially compared to the JVM - the Java debuggers are able to derive much of their information from the reflection and class metadata that's already there in the class files, so from that perspective DWARF adds a huge amount of overhead.) Platform ABI limitations - Currently LLVM requires the frontend developer to know quite a lot about the platform ABI - for example whether you are allowed to pass a struct of a certain size as a value type rather than as a reference. The thing is, experimental languages like mine generally don't care so much about ABI compatibility - sure, we'd like to be able to call C library functions once in a while (and we don't mind doing the extra work in those cases), but most of the time we just want to pass a data type around and expect it to work. Requiring the use of different techniques on different platforms makes the situation considerably more complex. Light-weight coroutines would be a "nice to have", as would better concurrency primitives. These are things I could do on my own, but it would be better, I think, to have them in LLVM - because in my view of the world, anything that requires lots of architecture-specific knowledge ideally belongs on the LLVM side of the line. There's been a lot of discussion about divide-by-zero errors and other non-declared exceptions. Having this available would be a great help. Named structure types - as per Chris's proposal - would be a major simplification, as it would allow declaration of pointer fields without having to import the code that defines the structure of the thing that the pointer is pointing to. Anyway that's pretty much my list of big-ticket items. As you can see, anyone who cares about these issues would have to think very hard before choosing LLVM over the JVM as an implementation platform. -- -- Talin
Comments inline. On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Jon Harrop < jonathandeanharrop at googlemail.com> wrote:> Hi Talin, > > I wrote HLVM: > > http://www.ffconsultancy.com/ocaml/hlvm/ > > The whole project took a few man months. HLVM provides an ML-like type > system, unboxed tuples, discriminated unions, TCO, generic printing, C FFI, > POSIX threads, mark-sweep GC and both JIT and standalone compilation. I > wrote several (accurate) garbage collectors for it including a > stop-the-world mark-sweep collector and they took a few days each. I did so > by implementing my own shadow stack along the lines of Henderson's > "Accurate garbage collection in an uncooperative environment". HLVM was > only ever a hobby project. IMHO, the results were incredible and are a > testament to the awesomeness of LLVM. > > HLVM prototyped many interesting ideas but the most relevant here is the > use of value types to avoid heap allocation in order to alleviate the > garbage collector. For example, HLVM is about 3x faster than Java on the > following ray tracing benchmark because HLVM does no allocation or > collection whilst tracing whereas Java does a huge amount: > > > http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/hlvm-on-ray-tracer-language-comparison.html > > I believe that benchmark shows that even the most heavily optimized GC can > be thrashed by a program that simply avoids GC. Value types make this > possible and the lack of value types on the JVM is, therefore, a major > issue. > > I've looked over the HLVM code a bit in the past. Note that I do havevalue types in my language, although they are not ubiquitous.> Now, I have some concerns about the statements being made here regarding > GC support in LLVM. Let me begin by addressing the statement: > > > Garbage collection is still way too difficult. > > This is completely untrue. You can easily write your own GC simply by > storing roots explicitly in your own shadow stack. Contrary to what many > people told me before I did this, performance is fine for many applications: > > > http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/current-shadow-stack-overheads-in-hlvm.html > > I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree.First off, since you mentioned shadow-stack: All that shadow stack does is tell you at what offsets, for each stack frame, the stack root pointers are. Now, my garbage collector doesn't use shadow-stack, it uses the *real* stack - that is, instead of maintaining a parallel linked list of stack frames which has to be updated on function entry and exit, it uses the actual call frame pointers to traverse the list of call frames. This avoids the need to update a global variable (even a thread-local global) each time a call frame is entered and exited, which is what shadow-stack requires. The actual code to do this is fairly trivial - much less code involved than shadow stack, but there is one minor hitch - you have to re-implement it for each different processor, since different processors store the call frame pointer in a different register. I think it would be nice if LLVM supplied a standard way to do this, but it's not something that is a serious obstacle to me. But all of that is unimportant - my stack traversal is semantically equivalent to shadow-stack. None of the rest of what I'm about to say would make any difference if I was using shadow stack. That's not where the problems lie. The main problem, as I see it, is the design of the llvm.gcroot() intrinsic. The first problem with it is that the argument to llvm.gcroot must be a memory address - specifically, it must be the result of an alloca instruction. That means that even if you have nice value types, they have to live in memory in order for them to be traced. You can't keep a value type in a register or an SSA value. If you do have some data type in a register, and it contains pointers that need to be traced, that value must be written to memory at each call site, and reloaded from memory after the call returns. (The latter is only true if you have a moving collector, which I do.) A second problem is that you are required to explicitly declare as stack root not only your local variables, but any intermediate results of expression. In other words, the "root-ness" of a value doesn't automatically follow along with the value, as it would with a type-based approach. The result is that the frontend ends up generating horrible, horrible code that is littered with extra allocas, calls to llvm.gcroot(), and lots of extra loads and stores. A third problem is that the optimizer *has* to know about garbage collection, because the optimizer can do things that might invalidate your garbage collector's assumptions. For example, the optimizer might decide to slice a struct in half, placing each half in a register - at which point, your table of offsets showing where the traceable pointers are is now meaningless. From what people have told me, LLVM currently handles this by simply disabling most optimizations for any value which is marked with llvm.gcroot(). If "root-ness" were a property of a type, then the optimizer would be able to do whatever it wanted (mostly I guess), and then you'd be able to scan the output of the optimizer and identify roots by their types. Stack roots would only need to be traced if they were in a range of code where they were live. And so on. I believe the conclusion you meant to draw is that writing a GC using> LLVM's highly experimental GC support is way too difficult but that is a > very different statement. > > I don't know what you mean by "highly experimental GC support". As far asI know, LLVM's GC support consists of the combination of shadow-stack + the llvm.gc intrinsic functions. And as far as I know, there have been no changes to either of these in over 4 years. Which is to say, it's clearly not an area which is the focus of anyone's attention.> This is a really important point because it means that all of the major > changes discussed so far are just optimizations beyond a simple shadow > stack. Moreover, I don't think we have any idea how valuable these > optimizations might be. Therefore, I think this discussion needs to start > with an objective survey of the possible approaches and some performance > estimates. > > Increasing performance is only half of the story. The other half is makingit easy to use. For me personally, I've managed to work around all of the issues that I've mentioned, but it took me a long time to get it right, and even today it's an ongoing burden - the IR code that my frontend generates is unreadable due to it being cluttered with extra instructions needed to deal with GC roots, which would not be needed if LLVM had a better means of indicating roots. In other words, I started this thread not because I needed the things I was asking for - I've already worked around the lack of them - but rather because I want those who come after to me to have a better experience than I had. My premise at the start of the thread is that more people choose the JVM over LLVM as a host platform for language experimentation, and I still think this is true.> HLVM's benchmarks indicate that the shadow stack overhead is usually under > 20% but can be as high as 70% with purely functional code. HLVM currently > pushes all roots onto the shadow stack as soon as they come into scope and > resets the shadow stack pointer at each function exit. A better approach > would be to defer pushing until safe points (if any) and push only live > roots (i.e. those referred to again after the safe point). > > I believe HLVM could attain competitive performance even on purely > functional data structures by using a non-moving mark-region collector. I > have written several prototypes in C++ but they are very much > work-in-progress. As the GCs are non-moving there is no need to restore > pointers after a safe point, which sounds more efficient to me. The > downside is that temporaries are no longer allocated by bumping a pointer > into the nursery generation but my mark-region GC uses a small bitwise LUT > to find the next free block in the current region which is almost as fast. > > Others have said that the best possible performance is obtained by making > the back-end aware of GC pointers. I can well believe that but the cost of > doing so with LLVM is so large that I think it will be necessary to > sacrifice optimality for something almost as good that is attainable with a > lot less effort. In fact, I would much rather see a separate project that > sits on top of LLVM and provides a safe high-level garbage collected VM for > language experimenters to use. > > I can't say how much difference in performance there would be if LLVM hada GC-aware optimizer, as opposed to what we have now, which is that GC-related code is mostly unoptimized (again, from what people have told me, not from my own observation).> Incidentally, if anyone wants to get up to speed on GC design I highly > recommend Richard Jones' new book on the subject: > > > http://www.amazon.co.uk/Garbage-Collection-Handbook-Management-Algorithms/dp/1420082795 > > Cheers, > Jon. > > From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On > Behalf Of Talin > Sent: 01 July 2011 19:06 > To: LLVM Developers Mailing List > Subject: [LLVMdev] LLVM and managed languages > > So I've been using LLVM for about 4 years now, and I've posted a lot on > this list about specific issues. What I would like to do is step back for a > moment and give my "big picture" assessment of LLVM overall, particularly > with respect to developing a "managed" language like Java / C# or my own > language, Tart. > > Obviously, I feel that LLVM is the best choice out there, otherwise I > would of switched to using other alternatives long ago. At the same time, > however, I've observed that the great majority of experimental languages - > Groovy, Scala, and many others - are built on top of the Java virtual > machine, which seems to be the platform of choice for language > experimenters. In a similar vein, if you spend any time studying the > academic research on garbage collection algorithms, you'll see that the JVM > also appears to be the platform of choice here as well. > > One question to ask is, what factors would weigh heavily in the decision > to choose the JVM over LLVM when implementing a managed language? On the > positive side, LLVM's mature and simple APIs make it a breeze to manipulate > types and functions, and it's modular architecture means I can use the > parts I want without being forced to use parts I don't need. And the > ability to go straight to machine code means that I don't need to ship a > complex virtual machine with my executables. > > I would also like to list the areas where I don't need help from LLVM - > that is, these are things I can easily handle myself in the frontend: > • Dynamic dispatch and virtual methods / multi-methods > • Boxing and unboxing of value types > • Reflection > • Memory management > I mention these items for two reasons: First, because these are services > that would be provided by a JVM, and I want people to know that the lack of > these items in LLVM does not in any way count as a detriment. And secondly, > because I've occasionally heard people on this list ask for features like > these, and I think it would be a waste of time to spend effort implementing > something that the frontend can easily handle. > > Next, I want to list the areas where I think LLVM is lacking: > > The first issue is more of a community-related one, which is that IMHO > LLVM doesn't have a lot of forward momentum in the experimental languages > space. The vast majority of contributions to the LLVM code base fall into > three categories: Clang-related work, ports to new backends, and > optimization research. Parts of LLVM which don't fall into these categories > - like garbage collection for example - tend to languish. > > Note that this is not a criticism, but merely an observation - if it were > a criticism I'd have to blame myself as much as anyone else. There are good > reasons why things are as they are - the few people like myself who are > working on non-C-like languages generally don't have the energy to both > work on their front ends and at the same time do any serious amount of work > on the LLVM infrastructure. (You all saw what happened with the union types > fiasco - I contributed all of the front-end parts for declaring and > serializing unions, in the hopes that someone more knowledgeable would pick > up the effort of implementing them on the code generation side - but that > never happened and the feature got removed after six months of no progress.) > > I think that LLVM's best hope in this department is that one of these > experimental languages becomes popular enough to attract a serious > contributor base of it's own, and that some of that effort can bleed off > into improving LLVM. Some of that was actually starting to happen in the > case of unladen-swallow, before that project was shut down. > > The rest of my issues are more specific: > > Garbage collection is still way too difficult. The biggest problem is the > inability to track SSA values - it requires the frontend to generate very > inefficient and error-prone code, manually spilling SSA values to the stack > around nearly every function call. I've written proposals for improving the > situation, which I won't repeat here - but realistically there's no way > that I am ever going to have time learn to enough about LLVM's code > generation passes to implement something like this myself. > > Another area which I'd like to see supported is stack walking - that is, > starting from the current call frame, iterate through all of the call > frames above it. Currently the only way to do this is via platform-specific > assembly language - I'd think it would be relatively simple to make an > intrinsic that does this. (Note that the current stack intrinsics are > unusable, because they are (a) unreliable, and (b) inefficient. Taking an > integer index of a stack frame as a parameter is not the right way to do > it.) > > > I have to say, if there's any single issue that could make me give up on > LLVM and switch over to using something like a JVM, it would be this - > because as far as I can tell, LLVM's garbage collection features are in > exactly the same state they were in when I started working with LLVM four > years ago. > > Generating debug info is another area which is very hard to use. The new > DIBuilder class was a significant improvement, but the whole area is still > very complex, it's extremely easy to make mistakes and then spend days or > weeks trying to figure out what went wrong - there's no type safety or > validation that can prevent you from making such mistakes. Over the last 4 > years I've spent many man-months of time wrestling with DWARF. > > (One also wonders if DWARF is even the right answer. Especially compared > to the JVM - the Java debuggers are able to derive much of their > information from the reflection and class metadata that's already there in > the class files, so from that perspective DWARF adds a huge amount of > overhead.) > > Platform ABI limitations - Currently LLVM requires the frontend developer > to know quite a lot about the platform ABI - for example whether you are > allowed to pass a struct of a certain size as a value type rather than as a > reference. The thing is, experimental languages like mine generally don't > care so much about ABI compatibility - sure, we'd like to be able to call C > library functions once in a while (and we don't mind doing the extra work > in those cases), but most of the time we just want to pass a data type > around and expect it to work. Requiring the use of different techniques on > different platforms makes the situation considerably more complex. > > Light-weight coroutines would be a "nice to have", as would better > concurrency primitives. These are things I could do on my own, but it would > be better, I think, to have them in LLVM - because in my view of the world, > anything that requires lots of architecture-specific knowledge ideally > belongs on the LLVM side of the line. > > There's been a lot of discussion about divide-by-zero errors and other > non-declared exceptions. Having this available would be a great help. > > Named structure types - as per Chris's proposal - would be a major > simplification, as it would allow declaration of pointer fields without > having to import the code that defines the structure of the thing that the > pointer is pointing to. > > Anyway that's pretty much my list of big-ticket items. As you can see, > anyone who cares about these issues would have to think very hard before > choosing LLVM over the JVM as an implementation platform. > > -- > -- Talin > >-- -- Talin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20111205/1566ad37/attachment.html>