Re: [whopr] Design/implementation alternatives for the driver and WPA

[Kenneth Zadeck <zadeck at naturalbridge dot com>]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> Kenneth Zadeck <zadeck@naturalbridge.com> writes:
>
>   
> > I think that one thing that the gcc community should understand is
> > that to a great extent whopr is a google thing.   All of the documents
> > are drafted by google people, in meetings that are only open to google
> > people and it is only after these documents have been drafted do the
> > people who are outside of google who are working on lto, like Honza
> > and myself, see the documents and get to comment.  The gcc community
> > never sees the constraints, deadlines, needs, or benchmarks that are
> > motivating the decisions that are made in the whopr documents.
> >     
>
> Every new gcc development starts that way.  Somebody has to put
> together the initial proposal.  How many people were invited to work
> on the initial LTO proposal before it was sent out?  Did anybody
> outside of Red Hat see the tree-ssa proposal before it was sent out?
>
> The WHOPR document has been out there for some time, and it was sent
> out before any implementation work started.  There is no Google cabal
> pushing it.  There is no secret information behind it, no constraints
> or deadlines or benchmarks.  We did have the advantage of talking to
> Google employees about their experience with LTO-style work done at
> Intel and HP and Transmeta.  Some of the people we talked to have no
> plans or interest in working on gcc, and it would not be fair to rope
> them into the conversation further.  Google's needs are clear: we have
> large programs.
>
> Let's deal with these issues on the technical merits, not on
> organizational issues.  If Google were dumping code on gcc, you would
> have a legitimate complaint.  Here Google is proposing plans before
> any work is started.  You seem to be complaining that the community
> should have seen the plans at an earlier stage.  That makes no sense.
> They are still just plans, they were based on all of two days of
> meetings and discussions, and they are still completely open to
> discussion and change.
>
>
>   
Ian, i am not dumping on google.   But there is a particular perspective 
that you have which is driven by your legitimate need to handle very 
large applications.  This perspective may not be shared by the rest of 
the gcc community.   I was really only pointing that out.   In 
particular, there are a lot of decisions that are being made in whopr to 
support very large applications that are done so at the expense of 
compiling modest and even large applications.  I do not necessarily 
disagree with these decisions, but I think that it is very important to 
get that out in front of everyone and let the community come to an 
informed consensus.  

> > Honza and I plan, and are implementing, a system where most, but
> > probably all of the ipa passes, will be able to work in an environment
> > where the entire call graph and all of the decls and types are
> > available.  I.e. only the function bodies are missing.    In this
> > environment, we plan to do all of the interprocedural analysis and
> > generate work orders that will be applied to each function.  
> >     
>
> I don't see that as being opposed to the WHOPR ideas.  It's not like
> WHOPR will prohibit that approach.  It's a limiting case.
>
>   

> > In particular, as consumer
> > machines get larger memories and more processors, the assumption that
> > we cannot see all of the functions bodies gets more questionable,
> > especially for modest sized apps that are the staple of the gcc
> > community.
> >     
>
> I question that assumption, and I especially question any assumption
> that gcc should only work for modest sized apps.
>
>   
Ian, there are tradeoffs here.   My point is that there are a lot of 
things that can be done with modest sized apps or libraries that cannot 
be done on google sized applications.  Remember that the majority of the 
world outside of google neither has google sized applications or could 
compile them if they did.

While i agree that some form of lto needs to support monster apps, that 
should not inhibit us from supporting transformations or models of 
compilation that are only practical with 100k line programs.  


> Ian
>