Re: Overwhelmed by GCC frustration

[Richard Biener <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>]

On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 6:00 PM, James Greenhalgh
<james.greenhalgh@arm.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 11:12:12AM -0400, Eric Gallager wrote:
>> On 8/1/17, Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 07:08:41AM -0400, Eric Gallager wrote:
>> >> > Heh.  I suspect -Os would benefit from a separate compilation pipeline
>> >> > such as -Og.  Nowadays the early optimization pipeline is what you
>> >> > want (mostly simple CSE & jump optimizations, focused on code
>> >> > size improvements).  That doesn't get you any loop optimizations but
>> >> > loop optimizations always have the chance to increase code size
>> >> > or register pressure.
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >> Maybe in addition to the -Os optimization level, GCC mainline could
>> >> also add the -Oz optimization level like Apple's GCC had, and clang
>> >> still has? Basically -Os is -O2 with additional code size focus,
>> >> whereas -Oz is -O0 with the same code size focus. Adding it to the
>> >> FSF's GCC, too, could help reduce code size even further than -Os
>> >> currently does.
>> >
>> > No, lack of optimizations certainly doesn't reduce the code size.
>> > For small code, you need lots of optimizations, but preferrably code-size
>> > aware ones.  For RTL that is usually easier, because you can often compare
>> > the sizes of the old and new sequences and choose smaller, for GIMPLE
>> > optimizations it is often just a wild guess on what optimizations generally
>> > result in smaller and what optimizations generally result in larger code.
>> > There are too many following passes to know for sure, and finding the right
>> > heuristics is hard.
>> >
>> >     Jakub
>> >
>>
>> Upon rereading of the relevant docs, I guess it was a mistake to
>> compare -Oz to -O0. Let me quote from the apple-gcc "Optimize Options"
>> page:
>>
>> -Oz
>>         (APPLE ONLY) Optimize for size, regardless of performance. -Oz
>>         enables the same optimization flags that -Os uses, but -Oz also
>>         enables other optimizations intended solely to reduce code size.
>>         In particular, instructions that encode into fewer bytes are
>>         preferred over longer instructions that execute in fewer cycles.
>>         -Oz on Darwin is very similar to -Os in FSF distributions of GCC.
>>         -Oz employs the same inlining limits and avoids string instructions
>>         just like -Os.
>>
>> Meanwhile, their description of -Os as contrasted to -Oz reads:
>>
>> -Os
>>         Optimize for size, but not at the expense of speed. -Os enables all
>>         -O2 optimizations that do not typically increase code size.
>>         However, instructions are chosen for best performance, regardless
>>         of size. To optimize solely for size on Darwin, use -Oz (APPLE
>>         ONLY).
>>
>> And the clang docs for -Oz say:
>>
>> -Oz Like -Os (and thus -O2), but reduces code size further.
>>
>> So -Oz does actually still optimize, so it's more like -O2 than -O0
>> after all, just even more size-focused than -Os.
>
> The relationship between -Os and -Oz is like the relationship between -O2
> and -O3.
>
> If -O3 says, try everything you can to increase performance even at the
> expense of code-size and compile time, then -Oz says, try everything you
> can to reduce the code size, even at the expense of performance and
> compile time.

Note for GCC -Os has been this historically.  I'd say that compared to
other compilers -O2 is what they do at -Os -- balance speed and size
with GCC being much more conservative on the size side than other
compilers.  Recently we've "weakened" -Os by for example allowing
integer division to expand to mul/add sequences but IIRC that was based
on the costs the target provides.

Richard.

> Thanks,
> James
>