mozilla/rust — pull request #8700 by alexcrichton (2013-08-23 04:19:14+00:00)
Title: Rewrite pass management with LLVM

Beforehand, it was unclear whether rust was performing the "recommended set" of
optimizations provided by LLVM for code. This commit changes the way we run
passes to closely mirror that of clang, which in theory does it correctly. The
notable changes include:

* Passes are no longer explicitly added one by one. This would be difficult to
keep up with as LLVM changes and we don't guaranteed always know the best
order in which to run passes
* Passes are now managed by LLVM's PassManagerBuilder object. This is then used
to populate the various pass managers run.
* We now run both a FunctionPassManager and a module-wide PassManager. This is
what clang does, and I presume that we *may* see a speed boost from the
module-wide passes just having to do less work. I have no measured this.
* The codegen pass manager has been extracted to its own separate pass manager
to not get mixed up with the other passes
* All pass managers now include passes for target-specific data layout and
analysis passes

Some new features include:

* You can now print all passes being run with `-Z print-llvm-passes`
* When specifying passes via `--passes`, the passes are now appended to the
default list of passes instead of overwriting them.
* The output of `--passes list` is now generated by LLVM instead of maintaining
a list of passes ourselves
* Loop vectorization is turned on by default as an optimization pass and can be
disabled with `-Z no-vectorize-loops`

All of these "copies" of clang are based off their [source code](http://clang.llvm.org/doxygen/BackendUtil_8cpp_source.html) in case anyone is curious what my source is. I was hoping that this would fix #8665, but this does not help the performance issues found there. Hopefully i'll allow us to tweak passes or see what's going on to try to debug that problem.