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<title>slang.git/source/slang/slang-ir-autodiff-fwd.cpp, branch master</title>
<subtitle>Making it easier to work with shaders</subtitle>
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<updated>2025-10-15T01:00:47+00:00</updated>
<entry>
<title>Clean up Slang IR representation of undefined values (#8708)</title>
<updated>2025-10-15T01:00:47+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Theresa Foley</name>
<email>10618364+tangent-vector@users.noreply.github.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-10-15T01:00:47+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:907410f6a52cf4e7538870ebf5aeb88858f97973</id>
<content type='text'>
Prior to this change, the Slang IR used a single opcode
(`kIROp_Undefined`) to encode all cases of undefined values. The
particular motivation for this change was a need to distinguish those
undefined values that represent a load from an uninitialized memory
location versus other sorts of undefined values. If transforming a
variable into SSA form results in `undefined` values in cases where the
a `load` was executed without a prior `store`, that represents an error
on the programmer's part, and should be diagnosed. However, other cases
of undefined values can arise during program transformation and
optimization, and should not typically result in diagnostics being
emitted.

While it was not the original motivation for this change, it is also
worth noting that the LLVM project has transitioned from initially using
only a single `undef` instruction to having a more nuanced model, and
the same factors that motivated their shift also apply to the Slang IR.
Counter-intuitively, the semantics of undefined values actually need to
be carefully defined.

Concretely, this change splits the pre-existing `undefined` opcode into
two sub-cases:

- `kIROp_LoadFromUninitializedMemory`, to represent the case of loading
from a memory location (such as a local variable) that has not been
initialized.

- `kIROp_Poison`, corresponding to the LLVM `poison` value.

Our poison instruction is intended to have semantics comparable to
LLVM's equivalent. Conceptually, any operation that is invoked with a
poison value as input will (with a few exceptions) produce a poison
value as output. One can think of the behavior of `poison` as similar to
how not-a-number values propagate in floating-point computations: by
default they "infect" the result of any computation they are involved
in. This semantic choice helps to ensure that many optimizations end up
being correct in the presence of undefined values, even if they did not
specifically account for them.

The `kIROp_LoadFromUninitializedMemory` case is comparable to the
combination of `freeze` and `undef` in LLVM. An LLVM `undef` value has
semantics that allow *each* use of that value to be replaced with a
*different* arbitrary value; these semantics cause many optimizations to
only be correct in the absence of undefined values. An LLVM `freeze`
instruction can take an undefined value as input, and produces a single
value that is still arbitrary, but must be consistent across all uses.
The latter semantics are what we want, since a given `load` from an
uninitialized memory location will yield an arbitrary-but-fixed value.

Note that we intentionally do not have a direct analogue to LLVM's
`undef` instruction, because of the way that `undef` causes so many
complications when trying to write optimizations.

We also do not add a `kIROp_Freeze` instruction in this change, but that
is simply because we currently have no need for it.

Existing code that was creating `IRUndefined` values has been updated to
create either `IRPoison` or `IRLoadFromUninitializedMemory` values, as
appropriate to the use case. Code that was checking for the
`kIROp_Undefined` opcode has been updated to either check for both of
the new opcodes (in the case of `switch` statements), or to use
`as&lt;IRUndefined&gt;` to perform a dynamic cast to the common base type of
the two new instructions.

Note that this change does not alter the way that instructions
representing undefined values are typically emitted as ordinary
instructions in the block that produces an undefined value. While
emitting `IRLoadFromUninitializedMemory` as an ordinary instruction is
exactly what we want, the `IRPoison` case would actually be better
represented in Slang IR as a "hoistable" instruction, so that there
would only be a singular `poison` value of each type. Changing
`IRPoison` to be hoistable would be a good follow-up change, but might
run into more challenges depending on what assumptions (if any) the
codebase is making about where undefined values get emitted.

---------

Co-authored-by: slangbot &lt;186143334+slangbot@users.noreply.github.com&gt;</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Rename some symbols related to pointers types (#8592)</title>
<updated>2025-10-03T04:48:11+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Theresa Foley</name>
<email>10618364+tangent-vector@users.noreply.github.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-10-03T04:48:11+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:cc8f6a241edb47c43c5698ee33abed4fe57d4566</id>
<content type='text'>
Note that while this change touched a large numer of files, there are no
changes to functionality being made here. The only things being done are
renaming various symbols and, in a few cases, updating or adding
comments for consistency with the new names.

The core of the naming changes are:

* Most things named to refer to `OutType` (e.g., `IROutType`,
`IRBuilder::getOutType()`, etc.) have been consistently renamed to refer
to `OutParamType`, to emphasize that the relevant AST/IR node types are
only intended for use to represent `out` parameters.

* The same change as described above for `OutType` is also made for
`RefType`, which becomes `RefParamType` in most cases. One mess that
this exposes is the way that the `ExplicitRef&lt;T&gt;` type in the core
module currently lowers to `IRRefParamType`. This change sticks to the
rule of not making functional changes, so that mess is left as-is for
now.

* Names referring to `InOutType` have been changed to instead refer to
`BorrowInOutType`. The intention with this naming change is to emphasize
that the Slang rules for `inout` are semantically those of a borrow (or
at least our interpretation of what a borrow means).

* Names referring to `ConstRefType` have been changed to instead refer
to `BorrowInType`. This change starts work on clarifying that the
existing `__constref` modifier was never intended to be a read-only
analogue of `__ref`, and instead is the input-only analogue of `inout`.

* The `ParameterDirection` enum type has been changed to
`ParamPassingMode`, to reflect the fact that the concept of "direction"
fails to capture what is actually being encoded, particularly once we
have modes beyond simple `in`/`out`/`inout`.

While this change does not alter behavior in any case (the user-exposed
Slang language is unchanged), it is intended to set up subsequence
changes that will work to make the handling of these types in the
compiler more nuanced and correct. Breaking this part of the change out
separately is primarily motivated by a desire to minimize the effort for
reviewers.

---------

Co-authored-by: slangbot &lt;186143334+slangbot@users.noreply.github.com&gt;</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>extend fiddle to allow custom lua splices in more places (#7559)</title>
<updated>2025-07-01T19:03:41+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Ellie Hermaszewska</name>
<email>ellieh@nvidia.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-07-01T19:03:41+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:5120c1cd072548654c9ce79fa85426a5e48736c4</id>
<content type='text'>
* Add fkYAML submodule

* Generate slang-ir-inst-defs.h from slang-ir-inst-defs.yaml

* generate ir-inst-defs.h

* neaten things

* neaten inst def parser

* add rapidyaml submodule

* remove fkyaml

* remove fkyaml submodule

* remove use of ir-inst-defs.h

* format and warnings

* fix wasm build

* tidy

* remove rapidyaml

* Extend fiddle to allow custom splices in more places

* Use lua to describe ir insts

* fix

* neaten

* neaten

* neaten

* spelling

* neaten

* comment comment out assert

* merge</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Fix intermittent debug failures with Debug build (#7369)</title>
<updated>2025-06-12T05:33:16+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Jay Kwak</name>
<email>82421531+jkwak-work@users.noreply.github.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-06-12T05:33:16+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:7dad68f869502e5c0ab32c12cbf8db866e020713</id>
<content type='text'>
This PR replaces enable/disable style C function calls with C++ RAII style code.

In debug build, when an assertion failed in between enable and disable functions, an exception is thrown and the disable function is not called. RAII style code is safer for an exception</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Make interface types non c-style in Slang2026. (#7260)</title>
<updated>2025-06-04T20:05:58+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Yong He</name>
<email>yonghe@outlook.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-06-04T20:05:58+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:812e478989e27983b8dea7ab11964de751654ba2</id>
<content type='text'>
* Make interface types non c-style.

* Make Optional&lt;T&gt; work with autodiff and existential types.

* Fix.

* patch behind slang 2026.

* Fix warnings.

* cleanup.

* Fix tests.

* Fix.

* Fix com interface lowering.

* Add comment to test.

* regenerate command line reference

* Add test for passing `none` to autodiff function.

* Fix recording of `getDynamicObjectRTTIBytes`.

* Fix nested Optional types.

---------

Co-authored-by: slangbot &lt;186143334+slangbot@users.noreply.github.com&gt;</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Add debug information for slang inling (#6621)</title>
<updated>2025-05-10T20:59:37+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Mukund Keshava</name>
<email>mkeshava@nvidia.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-05-10T20:59:37+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:083eecee3f56b90c7011895f53aaafa9db15856e</id>
<content type='text'>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Add IREnumType to distinguish enums from ints and each other (#6973)</title>
<updated>2025-05-03T20:27:03+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Julius Ikkala</name>
<email>julius.ikkala@gmail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-05-03T20:27:03+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:6f6103c4dbc77d5bceae7c8e766ec3cabc293364</id>
<content type='text'>
* Add IREnumType to distinguish enums from ints and each other

* Add issue example as test

* format code

* Add expected test output

* Fix peephole optimization hanging

No idea why this PR triggered this, but there seems to have been a clear bug
here anyway, so may just as well fix it now.

* Move enum lowering later

* Add linkage decoration to enum type

* Use filecheck-buffer instead of expected.txt

* Fix comment

* Make enum casts actually use IR enum casts

They were all BuiltinCasts by accident

* Lower enum type before VM

* Deal with rate-qualified types in enum cast

* Allow any value marshalling for enum types

* Handle new enum instructions in a couple more switches

* Fix formatting

---------

Co-authored-by: slangbot &lt;186143334+slangbot@users.noreply.github.com&gt;</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Add flag to hoist instructions (#6740)</title>
<updated>2025-04-11T21:51:48+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>jarcherNV</name>
<email>jarcher@nvidia.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-04-11T21:51:48+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:61a6c211b1587a7b9ed6a24ae1ba6fe0600c80d8</id>
<content type='text'>
This fixes issue #6654

Only hoist instructions that are optimized by prepareFuncForForwardDiff.
Add flag hoistLoopInvariantInsts to IRSimplificationOptions and set this
to true only if called from prepareFuncForForwardDiff, then only hoist
if the flag is set. Additionally, do not hoist loops if they only have a
single trivial iteration.</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Add auto-diff support for `GetOffsetPtr` (#6625)</title>
<updated>2025-03-17T19:02:37+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Sai Praveen Bangaru</name>
<email>31557731+saipraveenb25@users.noreply.github.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-03-17T19:02:37+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:0c7104e609d93a46d247f75d4ea8a16dc5ee5855</id>
<content type='text'>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Fix crash when swizzling non-differentiable types (#6613)</title>
<updated>2025-03-17T15:05:14+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Sai Praveen Bangaru</name>
<email>31557731+saipraveenb25@users.noreply.github.com</email>
</author>
<published>2025-03-17T15:05:14+00:00</published>
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<id>urn:sha1:714ee76af46b96c32724f0d6edb159fddeffc6bf</id>
<content type='text'>
* Fix crash when swizzling non-differentiable types

* Update slang-ir-autodiff-fwd.cpp</content>
</entry>
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