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Investigate better bitpacking for Operand and Use

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Refactor
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust

Research direction

Start by locating the definitions and bit layouts for Operand and Use, then trace how their u32 fields encode register, virtual-register, instruction, and constraint information. Measure the current limits and compilation-time impact before evaluating whether infrequently used information can be stored out of line. Done should include a concrete design that raises relevant limits without expanding the common representation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Two core data-structure elements, Operand and Use, are both designed to fit a relatively large amount of information in one u32. This is a performance optimization that we have found to be relatively impactful; expanding even to a u64 has a measurable impact (of at least a few percent) on compilation time.

Unfortunately, the scarcity of bits means that certain limits are lower than we would prefer. For example, we support only a 5-bit index for physical registers in each register class (so 32 integer registers and 32 float/vector registers), which may not be enough for some use-cases (though it can work for aarch64 and x64 at least). This also limits the VReg count to 1M (2^20).

We should investigate ways of, e.g., out-of-lining infrequently-used information (such as fixed-PReg constraints) to raise the limits on VRegs, PRegs, instruction count, and the like and provide enough headroom for any reasonably-imaginable use case.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
266
Forks
54
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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