[fpc-devel] Merging identical procedure proposals

[Benito van der Zander]

Hi,

  that is a great idea

It especially useful for generics, where each specialization can create 
a huge amount of identical methods

Best,
Benito
On 13.10.21 19:33, J. Gareth Moreton via fpc-devel wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> So one optimisation that has cropped up a couple of times is finding 
> ways to merge subroutines that, while containing different source 
> code, compile into the exact same assembly language.  For example, 
> TStream.WriteData has implementations for numerous input types, and 
> the compilation of "function TStream.WriteData(const Buffer: 
> WideChar): NativeInt;", "function TStream.WriteData(const Buffer: 
> Int16): NativeInt;", "function TStream.WriteData(const Buffer: 
> UInt16): NativeInt;" all produce the following:
>
>     leaq    -40(%rsp),%rsp
> .seh_stackalloc 40
> .seh_endprologue
>     movq    %rcx,%rax
>     movw    %dx,32(%rsp)
>     leaq    32(%rsp),%rdx
>     movl    $2,%r8d
>     movq    (%rax),%rax
>     call    *264(%rax)
>     movslq    %eax,%rax
>     nop
>     leaq    40(%rsp),%rsp
>     ret
> .seh_endproc
>
> As you can imagine, having the compiler only keep one copy of the code 
> and redirect all relevant calls to it will reduce code size 
> significantly for no speed penalty.
>
> One thought I had was to keep a "code hash" for each subroutine that's 
> computed via digesting the assembly language, although I'm not quite 
> sure how it should handle labels.  If two hashes are identical, the 
> procedures are checked more closely to determine if they are actually 
> identical and it wasn't just a collision.
>
> I figure this would be a whole-program optimization though due to 
> inter-unit calls and comparisons and the like.
>
> Gareth aka. Kit
>
>
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