The idea behind this canonicalization is that it allows us to handle less
patterns, because we know that some will be canonicalized away. This is
indeed very useful to e.g. know that constants are always on the right.
However, this is only useful if the canonicalization is actually
reliable. This is the case for constants, but not for arguments: Moving
these to the right makes it look like the "more complex" expression is
guaranteed to be on the left, but this is not actually the case in
practice. It fails as soon as you replace the argument with another
instruction.
The end result is that it looks like things correctly work in tests,
while they actually don't. We use the "thwart complexity-based
canonicalization" trick to handle this in tests, but it's often a
challenge for new contributors to get this right, and based on the
regressions this PR originally exposed, we clearly don't get this right
in many cases.
For this reason, I think that it's better to remove this complexity
canonicalization. It will make it much easier to write tests for
commuted cases and make sure that they are handled.
A set of microbenchmarks (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-test-suite/pull/26) showed that loop interleaving can be beneficial for loops with low trip count as well. Loop interleaving count computation is updated accordingly in prior patches while this patch removes the loop trip count threshold for interleaving.
This patch canonicalizes getelementptr instructions with constant
indices to use the `i8` source element type. This makes it easier for
optimizations to recognize that two GEPs are identical, because they
don't need to see past many different ways to express the same offset.
This is a first step towards
https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-replacing-getelementptr-with-ptradd/68699.
This is limited to constant GEPs only for now, as they have a clear
canonical form, while we're not yet sure how exactly to deal with
variable indices.
The test llvm/test/Transforms/PhaseOrdering/switch_with_geps.ll gives
two representative examples of the kind of optimization improvement we
expect from this change. In the first test SimplifyCFG can now realize
that all switch branches are actually the same. In the second test it
can convert it into simple arithmetic. These are representative of
common optimization failures we see in Rust.
Fixes https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/69841.
