Now, the pointed-to type is always uniform by default (if an explicit
rate qualifier isn't provided). This rule is easier to remember and
seems to work well in more cases than the previous rule from 6d7ff7eba2.
Now, if a struct member has an explicit 'uniform' or 'varying'
qualifier, then that member has that variability, regardless of
the variability of the struct's variability. Members without
'uniform' or 'varying' have unbound variability, and in turn
inherit the variability of the struct.
As a result of this, now structs can properly be 'varying' by default,
just like all the other types, while still having sensible semantics.
Now, if rate qualifiers aren't used to specify otherwise, varying
pointers point to uniform types by default. As before, uniform
pointers point to varying types by default.
float *foo; // varying pointer to uniform float
float * uniform foo; // uniform pointer to varying float
These defaults seem to require the least amount of explicit
uniform/varying qualifiers for most common cases, though TBD if it
would be easier to have a single rule that e.g. the pointed-to type
is always uniform by default.
There are two related optimizations that happen now. (These
currently only apply for gathers where the mask is known to be
all on, and to gathers that are accessing 32-bit sized elements,
but both of these may be generalized in the future.)
First, for any single gather, we are now more flexible in mapping it
to individual memory operations. Previously, we would only either map
it to a general gather (one scalar load per SIMD lane), or an
unaligned vector load (if the program instances could be determined
to be accessing a sequential set of locations in memory.)
Now, we are able to break gathers into scalar, 2-wide (i.e. 64-bit),
4-wide, or 8-wide loads. Further, we now generate code that shuffles
these loads around. Doing fewer, larger loads in this manner, when
possible, can be more efficient.
Second, we can coalesce memory accesses across multiple gathers. If
we have a series of gathers without any memory writes in the middle,
then we try to analyze their reads collectively and choose an efficient
set of loads for them. Not only does this help if different gathers
reuse values from the same location in memory, but it's specifically
helpful when data with AOS layout is being accessed; in this case,
we're often able to generate wide vector loads and appropriate shuffles
automatically.
? : now short-circuits evaluation of the expressions following
the boolean test for varying test types. (It already did this
for uniform tests).
Issue #169.
We now follow C's approach of evaluating these: we don't evaluate
the second expression in the operator if the value of the first one
determines the overall result. Thus, these can now be used
idiomatically like (index < limit && array[index] > 0) and such.
For varying expressions, the mask is set appropriately when evaluating
the second expression.
(For expressions that can be determined to be both simple and safe to
evaluate with the mask all off, we still evaluate both sides and compute
the logical op result directly, which saves a number of branches and tests.
However, the effect of this should never be visible to the programmer.)
Issue #4.
We now do a single atomic hardware swap and then effectively do
swaps between the running program instances such that the result
is the same as if they had happened to run a particular ordering
of hardware swaps themselves.
Also cleaned up __atomic_swap_uniform_* built-in implementations
to not take the mask, which they weren't using anyway.
Finishes Issue #56.
Previously, when we had a switch statement with a uniform switch condition
but a 'break' statement that was under varying control flow inside the
switch, we'd promote the switch condition to be varying so that the
break would work correctly.
Now, we leave the condition as uniform and are thus able to use the
more-efficient LLVM switch instruction in this case.
Issue #156.
Switches with both uniform and varying "switch" expressions are
supported. Switch statements with varying expressions and very
large numbers of labels may not perform well; some issues to be
filed shortly will track opportunities for improving these.
ispc now supports goto, but only under uniform control flow--i.e.
it must be possible for the compiler to statically determine that
all program instances will follow the goto. An error is issued at
compile time if a goto is used when this is not the case.
Now we require that the struct name match for two struct types to be the same.
Added a test to check this.
(Also removed a stale test, movmsk-opt.ispc)
These make it easier to iterate over arbitrary amounts of data
elements; specifically, they automatically handle the "ragged
extra bits" that come up when the number of elements to be
processed isn't evenly divided by programCount.
TODO: documentation
The packed_{load,store}_active now functions take a pointer to a
location at which to start loading/storing, rather than an array
base and a uniform index.
Variants of the prefetch functions that take varying pointers
are now available.
There are now variants of the various atomic functions that take
varying pointers (issue #112).
Allow <, <=, >, >= comparisons of pointers
Allow explicit type-casting of pointers to and from integers
Fix bug in handling expressions of the form "int + ptr" ("ptr + int"
was fine).
Fix a bug in TypeCastExpr where varying -> uniform typecasts
would be allowed (leading to a crash later)
Allow atomic types to be initialized with single-element expression lists:
int x = { 5 };
Issue an error if a storage class is provided with a function parameter.
Issue an error if two members of a struct have the same name.
Issue an error on trying to assign to a struct with a const member, even if
the struct itself isn't const.
Issue an error if a function is redefined.
Issue an error if a function overload is declared that differs only in return
type from a previously-declared function.
Issue an error if "inline" or "task" qualifiers are used outside of function
declarations.
Allow trailing ',' at the end of enumerator lists.
Multiple tests for all of the above.
Pointers can be either uniform or varying, and behave correspondingly.
e.g.: "uniform float * varying" is a varying pointer to uniform float
data in memory, and "float * uniform" is a uniform pointer to varying
data in memory. Like other types, pointers are varying by default.
Pointer-based expressions, & and *, sizeof, ->, pointer arithmetic,
and the array/pointer duality all bahave as in C. Array arguments
to functions are converted to pointers, also like C.
There is a built-in NULL for a null pointer value; conversion from
compile-time constant 0 values to NULL still needs to be implemented.
Other changes:
- Syntax for references has been updated to be C++ style; a useful
warning is now issued if the "reference" keyword is used.
- It is now illegal to pass a varying lvalue as a reference parameter
to a function; references are essentially uniform pointers.
This case had previously been handled via special case call by value
return code. That path has been removed, now that varying pointers
are available to handle this use case (and much more).
- Some stdlib routines have been updated to take pointers as
arguments where appropriate (e.g. prefetch and the atomics).
A number of others still need attention.
- All of the examples have been updated
- Many new tests
TODO: documentation
Added support for resolving dimensions of multi-dimensional unsized arrays
from their initializer exprerssions (previously, only the first dimension
would be resolved.)
Added checks to make sure that no unsized array dimensions remain after
doing this (except for the first dimensision of array parameters to
functions.)
Substantial improvements and generalizations to the parsing and
declaration handling code to properly parse declarations involving
pointers. (No change to user-visible functionality, but this
lays groundwork for supporting a more general pointer model.)
Previously, it was only in the GatherScatterFlattenOpt optimization pass that
we added the per-lane offsets when we were indexing into varying data.
(Specifically, the case of float foo[]; int index; foo[index], where foo
is an array of varying elements rather than uniform elements.) Now, this
is done in the front-end as we're first emitting code.
In addition to the basic ugliness of doing this in an optimization pass,
it was also error-prone to do it there, since we no longer have access
to all of the type information that's around in the front-end.
No functionality or performance change.
In particular, this fixes issue #81, where a global variable access was leading to
ConstantExpressions showing up in this code, which it wasn't previously expecting.
Specifically, now we can work through phi nodes in the IR to detect cases
where an index value is actually the same across lanes or is linear across
the lanes. For example, this is a loop that used to require gathers but
is now turned into vector loads:
for (int i = programIndex; i < 16; i += programCount)
sum += a[i];
Fixes issue #107.
