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This change includes a lot of infrastructure work, but the main point is to allow code like the following:
```
// define an interface
interface Helper { float help(); }
// define a generic function that uses the interface
float test<T : Helper>( T t ) { return t.help(); }
// define a type that implements the interface
struct A : Helper { float help() { return 1.0 } }
// define an ordinary function that calls the
// generic function with a concrete type:
float doIt()
{
A a;
return test<A>(a);
}
```
Getting this to generate valid code involves a lot of steps. This change includes the initial version of all of these steps, but leaves a lot of gaps where more complete implementation is required.
The changes include:
- Member lookup on types has been centralized, and now handles the case where the type we are looking for a member in is a generic parameter (e.g., given `t.help()` we can now look up `help` in `Helper` by knowing that `t` is a `T` and `T` conforms to `Helper`).
- There is an obvious cleanup still to be done here where the same exact logic should be used to look up available "constructor" declarations inside a type when the type is used like a function.
- Add a notion of subtype constraint "wittnesses" to the type system. When a generic is declared as taking `<T : Helper>` it really takes two generic parameters: the type `T` and a proof that `T` conforms to `Helper`. The actual arguments to a generic will then include both the type argument and a suitable witness argument (both type-level values).
- As it stands right now, a witness wraps a `DeclRef` to the declaration that represents the appropriate subtype relationship. So if we have `struct A : Helper`, that `: Helper` part turns into an `InheritanceDecl` member, and a reference to that member can serve as a witness to the fact that `A` conforms to `Helper`.
- Make explicit generic application `G<A,B>` synthesize the additional arguments that represent conformances required by the generic.
- This does *not* yet deal with the case where a generic is implicitly specialized as part of an ordinary call `G(a,b)`
- A bug fix to not auto-specialize generics during lookup. The problem here was related to an attempted fix of an earlier issue.
During checking of a method nested in a generic type, we were running into problems where `DeclRefType::create()` was getting called on an un-specialized reference to `vector`, and this was leading to a crash when the code looked for the arguments for the generic. This was worked around by having name lookup automatically specialize any generics it runs into while going through lookup contexts.
That choice creates the problem that in a generic method like this:
```
void test<T>(T val) { ... }
```
any reference to `val` inside the body of `test` will end up getting specialized so that it is effectively `test<T>::val`, when that isn't really needed.
- Add front-end logic to check that when a type claims to conform to an interface it actually must provide the methods required by the interface. The checking process goes ahead and builds a front-end "witness table" that maps declarations in the interface being conformed to over to their concrete implementations for the type.
- At the moment the checking is completely broken and bad: it assumes that *any* member with the right name is an appropriate declaration to satisfy a requirement. That obviously needs to be fixed.
- Add an explicit operation to the IR for lookup of methods: `lookup_interface_method(w, r)` where `w` is a reference to the "witness" value and `r` is an `IRDeclRef` for the member we want to look up.
- Add an explicit notion of witness tables to the IR. These end up being the IR representation of an `InheritanceDecl` in a type, and they are generated by enumerating the members that satisfy the interface requirements (which were handily already enumerated by the front-end checking). The witness table is an explicit IR value, and so it will be referenced/used at the site where conformance is being exploited (e.g., as part of a `specialize` call), so it should be safe to eliminate witness tables that are unused (since they represent conformances that aren't actually exploited). Similarly, the entries in a witness table are uses of the functions that implement interface methods, and so keep those live.
- In order to implement the above, I did a bit of a cleanup pass on the IR representation so that there is an `IRUser` base that `IRInst` inherits from, so that we can have users of values that aren't instructions.
- One annoying thing is that because of how types and generics are handled in the IR, we needed a way to have a type-level `Val` that wraps an IR-level value: e.g., to allow an IR-level witness table to be used as one of the arguments for specialization of a generic. The design I chose here is to have a "proxy" `Val` subclass (`IRProxyVal`) that wraps an `IRValue*`. These should only ever appear as part of types and `DeclRef`s that are used by the IR.
- One annoying bit here is that an IR value might then have a use that is not manifest in the set of IR instructions, and instead only appears as part of a type somewhere.
- I'm not 100% happy with this design, but it seems like we'd have to tackle similar issues if/when we eventually allow functions to have `constexpr` or `@Constant` parameters
- Make generic specialization also propagate witness table arguments through to their use sites (this is mostly just the existing substitution machinery, once we have `IRProxyVal`), and then include logic to specialize `lookup_interface_method` instructions when their first operand is a concrete witness table.
All of this work allows a single limited test using generics with constraints to pass, but more work is needed to make the solution robust.
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There are two big changes here:
- Add logic during the initial IR cloning pass for an entry point + target that tries to pick the best possible version of any target-overloaded function. This allows us to pick the intrinsic version of `saturate()` when compiling for HLSL output, but then pick the non-intrinsic version (that is implemented in terms of `clamp()`) when targetting GLSL.
- Add an initial specialization pass that tries to deal with generics. This required some fixing work to IR generation, so that we correctly generate explicit operations to specialize a generic for specific types (this is currently implemented as a `specialize` instruction that takes the generic to specialize plus a declaration-reference that represents the specialized form). With that work in place, we can scan for `specialize` instructions inside of non-generic functions, and use them to trigger generation of specialized code. We rely on the name-mangling scheme to help us find pre-existing specializations when possible.
There are also a bunch of cleanups encountered along the way:
- Don't use the explicit `layout(offset=...)` for uniforms, because it isn't supported by all current drivers. For now we will just assume that our layout rules compute the same values that the driver would for un-marked-up code. We can come back later and try to implement a workaround in the cases where this doesn't apply (e.g., by re-running the layout logic as part of emission, and dropping layout modifiers from variables that don't need explicit layout).
- Fix some issues in IR dump printing so that we print function declarations more nicely.
- Testing: print out failing pixel when image-diff fails
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* Get rid of the `-slang-ir-asm` target
This is really only useful for debugging, so I've replaced the functionality with a `-dump-ir` command line option (which dump's the IR for an entry point before doing codegen).
* fixup: use HLSL target, not DXBC, so test can run on Linux
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* IR: overhaul IR design/implementation
Closes #192
Closes #188
This is a major overhaul of how the IR is implemented, with the primary goal of just using the AST-level type representation as the IR's type representation, rather than inventing an entire shadow set of types (as captured in issue #192).
One consequence of this choice is that types in the IR are no longer explicit "instructions" and are not represented as ordinary operands (so a bunch of `+ 1` cases end up going away when enumerating ordinary operands).
Along the way I also got rid of the embedded IDs in the IR (issue #188) because this wasn't too hard to deal with at the same time.
Another related change was to split the `IRValue` and `IRInst` cases, so that there are values that are not also instructions. Non-instruction values are now used to represent literals, references to declarations, and would eventually be used for an `undef` value if we need one. IR functions, global variables, and basic blocks are all values (because they can appear as operands), but not instructions.
The main benefit of this approach is that the top-level structure of a bytecode (BC) module is much simpler to understand and walk, and BC-level types are represented much more directly (such that we could conceivably use them for reflection soon).
* fixup: 64-bit build fix
* fixup: try to silence clang's pedantic dependent-type errors
* fixup: bug in VM loading of constants
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None of these changes are made "live" at the moment. I'm just trying to get them checked in to avoid divering too far from `master` at any point during development.
- Add basic emit logic to produce GLSL from the IR in a few cases (the existing IR emit logic was ad hoc and HLSL-specific)
- When lowering a function declaration, walk up its chain of parent declarations to collect additional parameters as needed
- When lowering a call, make sure to add generic arguments that come from the declaration reference being called
- Attach a "mangled name" to symbols when lowering, so that we can eventually use that name to resolve things for linkage.
- After the above work, I had to apply some fixups to make sure that generic arguments *don't* get added when the user is calling an `__intrinsic_op` function, since those should map 1-to-1 down to instructions with just their ordinary parameter list.
A big open question right now is whether I should continue to represent the generic arguments as just part of the ordinary argument list for a function, or split them out into separate `applyGeneric` and `apply` steps.
A strongly related question is whether a declaration with generic parameters should lower into a single declaration, or one declaration nested inside an outer generic declaration.
A good future step at this point would be to eliminate a lot of the `__intrinsic_op` stuff in favor of having the builtin functions include their own definitions, which might be in terms of a new expression-level construct for writing inline IR operations. This can't be done until the existing AST-to-AST path is no longer needed for cross-compilation purposes.
More immediate next steps here:
- We need a way to round-trip calls to external declaration that get handled by this mangled-name logic. Basically, if we are asked to output HLSL and we see a call to `_S...GetDimensions...(float4, t, a, ...)` we need to be able to walk the mangled name and get back to `t.getDimensions(a, ...)` without a whole lot of manual definitions to make things round-trip.
- In the other case, where a declaration isn't built-in for the chosen target, we need to be able to load a module of target-specific definitions (which will somehow map back to symbols with certain mangled names) and then look these up (by mangled name) and then load/link/inline them into the user's IR to satisfy requirements in their code.
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At a high level, this commit adds two things:
1. A "bytecode" format for serializing Slang IR instructions and related structure (functions, "registers")
2. A virtual machine that can load and then execute code in that bytecode format.
The reason for kicking off this work right now is that we *need* a way to run tests on Slang code generation that doesn't rely on having a GPU present (given that our CI runs on VM instances without GPUs), nor on textual comparison to the output of other compilers. With these features I've implemented a slapdash `slang-eval-test` test fixture that can run a (trivial) compute shader to very our compilation flow through to bytecode.
Some key design constraints/challenges:
- The bytecode format should be "position independent" so that a user can just load a blob of data and then inspect it without having to deserialize into another format, allocate memory, etc. Eventually the bytecode format might be a replacement for out current reflection API (we used to base reflection off a similar format, but the cost/benefit wasn't there at the time and we switched to just using the AST).
- The VM should be able to execute bytecode functions without doing any per-operation translation, JIT, etc. (translation of more coarse-grained symbols is okay). For now the VM is just being used to run tests, but eventually I'd like it to be viable for:
- Running Slang-based code in the context of the compiler itself. This starts with stuff like constant-folding in the front-end, but could expand to more general metaprogramming features.
- Running Slang-based ocde within a runtime application (e.g., a game engine) that wants to be able to run things like "parameter shader" code, or even just evaluate compute-like code on CPU (e.g., when supporting particles on both CPU and GPU).
- Finally, the bytecode format should ideally be able to round-trip back to the IR without unacceptable loss of information. This requirement and the previous one play off of each other, because things like a traditional SSA phi operation is ugly when you have to actually *execute* it. This doesn't matter right now when we don't have SSA yet, but it might be part of the decision-making here.
The actual implementation is centralized in `bytecode.{h,cpp}` and `vm.{h.cpp}`.
Big picture notes:
- The space of opcodes is shared between IR and bytecode (BC), with the hope that this makes translation of operations between the two easy.
- The actual bytecode instruction stream relies on a variable-length encoding for integer values, including opcodes and operand numbers, so that the common case is single-byte encoding.
- In the long term I intend to have a rule that if you use a single-byte encoding for an opcode, then all operands are required to use single-byte encodings too. Operations that need multi-byte operands would then be forced to use a multi-byte encoding of the op, and would be sent down a slower path in the interpeter.
- The "bytecode"'s outer structure is based on ordinary data structures linked with pointers, but they are "relative pointers" so the actual structure is position-independent.
- There are two main kinds of operands: registers and "constants." An operand is a signed integer where non-negatie values indicate registers (with `index == operandVal`) and negative values indicate constants (with `index == ~operandVal`).
- Registers are stored in the "stack frame" for a VM function call, and each has a fixed offset based on the size of the type and those that come before it. Conceptually, registers are allowed to overlap if they aren't live at the same time, and we manage this with a simple stack model: every register is supposed to identify the register that comes directly before it (this isn't implemented yet).
- "Constants" are more realistically a representation of "captured" values, but they are currently also how constants come in. Basically we can use a compact range of indices in the bytecode for a function, and each of these indices indirectly refers to some value in the next outer scope.
- The actual encoding of bytecode instructions right now is largely ad-hoc and very wasteful (we encode the type on everything, and we also encode everything as if it had varargs).
- In some cases, an instruction needs to know the types of the values involved (e.g., because it needs to load an array element, which means copying a number of bytes based on the size). The way the VM works we have types attached to our registers, so we currently get sneaky and look at those types in some ops. Longer term is makes sense to encode the required type info directly in the BC.
- There's a whole lot of hand-waving going on with how the actual top-level bytecode module gets loaded, because of the way we currently treat the top-level module as an instruction stream in the IR. This means that we try to represent the loaded module as a "stack frame" for a call to the module as a function, but that approach as serious problems, and isn't realistically what we want to do.
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* IR: handle control flow constructs
This change includes a bunch of fixes and additions to the IR path:
- `slang-ir-assembly` is now a valid output target (so we can use it for testing)
- This uses what used to be the IR "dumping" logic, revamped to support much prettier output.
- A future change will need to add back support for less prettified output to use when actually debugging
- IR generation for `for` loops and `if` statements is supported
- HLSL output from the above control flow constructs is implemented
- Revamped the handling of l-values, and in particular work on compound ops like `+=`
- Add basic IR support for `groupshared` variables
- Add basic IR support for storing compute thread-group size
- Output semantics on entry point parameters
- This uses the AST structures to find semantics, so its still needs work
- Pass through loop unroll flags
- This is required to match `fxc` output, at least until we implement
unrolling ourselves.
* Fixup: 64-bit build issues.
* fixup for merge
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