On 3/3/19 4:06 PM, Patrick Palka wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I am very interested in working on GCC as part of GSoC this year. A few years
> ago I was a somewhat active code contributor[1] and unfortunately my
> contributing waned once I went back to school, but I'm excited to potentially
> have the opportunity to work on GCC again this summer. My contributions were
> mainly to the C++ frontend and to the middle end, and I've been thinking about
> potential projects in these areas of the compiler. Here are some project
> ideas
> related to parts of the compiler that I've worked on in the past:
>
> * Extend VRP to track unions of intervals
> (inspired by comment #2 of PR72443 [2])
> Value ranges tracked by VRP currently are represented as an interval or
> its complement: [a,b] and ~[a,b]. A natural extension of this is
> to support unions of intervals, e.g. [a,b]U[c,d]. Such an extension
> would make VRP more powerful and at the same time would subsume
> anti-ranges, potentially making the code less complex overall.
You should get in contact with Aldy and Andrew. I believe their work
already subsumes everything you've mentioned here.
>
> * Make TREE_NO_WARNING more fine-grained
> (inspired by comment #7 of PR74762 [3])
> TREE_NO_WARNING is currently used as a catch-all marker that inhibits
> all
> warnings related to the marked expression. The problem with this is
> that
> if some warning routine sets the flag for its own purpose,
> then that later may inhibit another unrelated warning from firing, see
> for
> example PR74762. Implementing a more fine-grained mechanism for
> inhibiting particular warnings would eliminate such issues.
Might be interesting. You'd probably need to discuss the details further.
>
> * Make -Wmaybe-uninitialized more robust
> (Inspired by the recent thread to move -Wmaybe-uninitialized to
> -Wextra [4])
> Right now the pass generates too many false-positives, and hopefully
> that
> can be fixed somewhat.
> I think a distinction could be made between the following two scenarios
> in
> which a false-positive warning is emitted:
> 1. the pass incorrectly proves that there exists an execution path
> that
>results in VAR being used uninitialized due to a deficiency in the
>implementation, or
> 2. the pass gives up on exhaustively verifying that all execution
> paths
>use VAR initialized (e.g. because there are too many paths to
> check).
>The MAX_NUM_CHAINS, MAX_CHAIN_LEN, etc constants currently control
>when this happens.
> I'd guess that a significant fraction of false-positives occur due to
> the
> second case, so maybe it would be worthwhile to allow the user to
> suppress
> warnings of this second type by specifying a warning level argument,
> e.g.
> -Wmaybe-uninitialized=1|2.
> Still, false-positives are generated in the first case too, see e.g.
> PR61112. These can be fixed by improving the pass to understand such
> control flow.
I'd suggest you look at my proposal from 2005 if you want to improve
some of this stuff.
You might also look at the proposal to distinguish between simple
scalars that are SSA_NAMEs and the addressable/aggregate cases.
In general I'm not a fan of extending the predicate analysis as-is in
tree-ssa-uninit.c. I'd first like to see it broken into an independent
analysis module. The analysis it does has applications for other
warnings and optimizations. Uninit warnings would just be a client of
hte generic analysis pass.
I'd love a way to annotate paths (or subpaths, or ssa-names) for cases
where the threaders identify a jump threading path, but don't actually
optimize it (often because it's a cold path or to avoid code bloat
problems). THese unexecutable paths that we leave in the CFG are often
a source of false positives when folks use -O1, -Os and profile directed
optimizations. Bodik has some thoughts in this space, but I haven't
really looked to see how feasible they are in the real world.
>
> * Bug fixing in the C++ frontend / general C++ frontend improvements
> There are 100s of open PRs about the C++ frontend, and the goal here
> would just be to resolve as many as one can over the summer.
Bugfixing is always good :-)
jeff
