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This PR adds a basic *alias analysis*, and optimizations that use it. This is a "mid-end optimization": it operates on CLIF, the machine-independent IR, before lowering occurs. The alias analysis (or maybe more properly, a sort of memory-value analysis) determines when it can prove a particular memory location is equal to a given SSA value, and when it can, it replaces any loads of that location. This subsumes two common optimizations: * Redundant load elimination: when the same memory address is loaded two times, and it can be proven that no intervening operations will write to that memory, then the second load is *redundant* and its result must be the same as the first. We can use the first load's result and remove the second load. * Store-to-load forwarding: when a load can be proven to access exactly the memory written by a preceding store, we can replace the load's result with the store's data operand, and remove the load. Both of these optimizations rely on a "last store" analysis that is a sort of coloring mechanism, split across disjoint categories of abstract state. The basic idea is that every memory-accessing operation is put into one of N disjoint categories; it is disallowed for memory to ever be accessed by an op in one category and later accessed by an op in another category. (The frontend must ensure this.) Then, given this, we scan the code and determine, for each memory-accessing op, when a single prior instruction is a store to the same category. This "colors" the instruction: it is, in a sense, a static name for that version of memory. This analysis provides an important invariant: if two operations access memory with the same last-store, then *no other store can alias* in the time between that last store and these operations. This must-not-alias property, together with a check that the accessed address is *exactly the same* (same SSA value and offset), and other attributes of the access (type, extension mode) are the same, let us prove that the results are the same. Given last-store info, we scan the instructions and build a table from "memory location" key (last store, address, offset, type, extension) to known SSA value stored in that location. A store inserts a new mapping. A load may also insert a new mapping, if we didn't already have one. Then when a load occurs and an entry already exists for its "location", we can reuse the value. This will be either RLE or St-to-Ld depending on where the value came from. Note that this *does* work across basic blocks: the last-store analysis is a full iterative dataflow pass, and we are careful to check dominance of a previously-defined value before aliasing to it at a potentially redundant load. So we will do the right thing if we only have a "partially redundant" load (loaded already but only in one predecessor block), but we will also correctly reuse a value if there is a store or load above a loop and a redundant load of that value within the loop, as long as no potentially-aliasing stores happen within the loop.
Cranelift Code Generator
A Bytecode Alliance project
Cranelift is a low-level retargetable code generator. It translates a target-independent intermediate representation into executable machine code.
For more information, see the documentation.
For an example of how to use the JIT, see the JIT Demo, which implements a toy language.
For an example of how to use Cranelift to run WebAssembly code, see Wasmtime, which implements a standalone, embeddable, VM using Cranelift.
Status
Cranelift currently supports enough functionality to run a wide variety of programs, including all the functionality needed to execute WebAssembly MVP functions, although it needs to be used within an external WebAssembly embedding to be part of a complete WebAssembly implementation.
The x86-64 backend is currently the most complete and stable; other architectures are in various stages of development. Cranelift currently supports both the System V AMD64 ABI calling convention used on many platforms and the Windows x64 calling convention. The performance of code produced by Cranelift is not yet impressive, though we have plans to fix that.
The core codegen crates have minimal dependencies, support no_std mode (see below), and do not require any host floating-point support, and do not use callstack recursion.
Cranelift does not yet perform mitigations for Spectre or related security issues, though it may do so in the future. It does not currently make any security-relevant instruction timing guarantees. It has seen a fair amount of testing and fuzzing, although more work is needed before it would be ready for a production use case.
Cranelift's APIs are not yet stable.
Cranelift currently requires Rust 1.37 or later to build.
Contributing
If you're interested in contributing to Cranelift: thank you! We have a contributing guide which will help you getting involved in the Cranelift project.
Planned uses
Cranelift is designed to be a code generator for WebAssembly, but it is general enough to be useful elsewhere too. The initial planned uses that affected its design are:
- WebAssembly compiler for the SpiderMonkey engine in Firefox.
- Backend for the IonMonkey JavaScript JIT compiler in Firefox.
- Debug build backend for the Rust compiler.
- Wasmtime non-Web wasm engine.
Building Cranelift
Cranelift uses a conventional Cargo build process.
Cranelift consists of a collection of crates, and uses a Cargo
Workspace,
so for some cargo commands, such as cargo test, the --all is needed
to tell cargo to visit all of the crates.
test-all.sh at the top level is a script which runs all the cargo
tests and also performs code format, lint, and documentation checks.
Building with no_std
The following crates support `no_std`, although they do depend on liballoc:
- cranelift-entity
- cranelift-bforest
- cranelift-codegen
- cranelift-frontend
- cranelift-native
- cranelift-wasm
- cranelift-module
- cranelift-preopt
- cranelift
To use no_std mode, disable the std feature and enable the core feature. This currently requires nightly rust.
For example, to build `cranelift-codegen`:
cd cranelift-codegen
cargo build --no-default-features --features core
Or, when using cranelift-codegen as a dependency (in Cargo.toml):
[dependency.cranelift-codegen]
...
default-features = false
features = ["core"]
no_std support is currently "best effort". We won't try to break it, and we'll accept patches fixing problems, however we don't expect all developers to build and test no_std when submitting patches. Accordingly, the ./test-all.sh script does not test no_std.
There is a separate ./test-no_std.sh script that tests the no_std support in packages which support it.
It's important to note that cranelift still needs liballoc to compile. Thus, whatever environment is used must implement an allocator.
Also, to allow the use of HashMaps with no_std, an external crate called hashmap_core is pulled in (via the core feature). This is mostly the same as std::collections::HashMap, except that it doesn't have DOS protection. Just something to think about.
Log configuration
Cranelift uses the log crate to log messages at various levels. It doesn't
specify any maximal logging level, so embedders can choose what it should be;
however, this can have an impact of Cranelift's code size. You can use log
features to reduce the maximum logging level. For instance if you want to limit
the level of logging to warn messages and above in release mode:
[dependency.log]
...
features = ["release_max_level_warn"]
Editor Support
Editor support for working with Cranelift IR (clif) files: