rust-lang/rust — pull request #15863 by dotdash (2014-07-21 17:14:41+00:00)
Title: Emit LLVM lifetime intrinsics to improve stack usage and codegen in general

Lifetime intrinsics help to reduce stack usage, because LLVM can apply
stack coloring to reuse the stack slots of dead allocas for new ones.

For example these functions now both use the same amount of stack, while
previous `bar()` used five times as much as `foo()`:

````rust
fn foo() {
println("{}", 5);
}

fn bar() {
println("{}", 5);
println("{}", 5);
println("{}", 5);
println("{}", 5);
println("{}", 5);
}
````

On top of that, LLVM can also optimize out certain operations when it
knows that memory is dead after a certain point. For example, it can
sometimes remove the zeroing used to cancel the drop glue. This is
possible when the glue drop itself was already removed because the
zeroing dominated the drop glue call. For example in:

````rust
pub fn bar(x: (Box, int)) -> (Box, int) {
x
}
````

With optimizations, this currently results in:

````llvm
define void @_ZN3bar20h330fa42547df8179niaE({ i64*, i64 }* noalias nocapture nonnull sret, { i64*, i64 }* noalias nocapture nonnull) unnamed_addr #0 {
"_ZN29_$LP$Box$LT$int$GT$$C$int$RP$39glue_drop.$x22glue_drop$x22$LP$1347$RP$17h88cf42702e5a322aE.exit":
%2 = bitcast { i64*, i64 }* %1 to i8*
%3 = bitcast { i64*, i64 }* %0 to i8*
tail call void @llvm.memcpy.p0i8.p0i8.i64(i8* %3, i8* %2, i64 16, i32 8, i1 false)
tail call void @llvm.memset.p0i8.i64(i8* %2, i8 0, i64 16, i32 8, i1 false)
ret void
}
````

But with lifetime intrinsics we get:

````llvm
define void @_ZN3bar20h330fa42547df8179niaE({ i64*, i64 }* noalias nocapture nonnull sret, { i64*, i64 }* noalias nocapture nonnull) unnamed_addr #0 {
"_ZN29_$LP$Box$LT$int$GT$$C$int$RP$39glue_drop.$x22glue_drop$x22$LP$1347$RP$17h88cf42702e5a322aE.exit":
%2 = bitcast { i64*, i64 }* %1 to i8*
%3 = bitcast { i64*, i64 }* %0 to i8*
tail call void @llvm.memcpy.p0i8.p0i8.i64(i8* %3, i8* %2, i64 16, i32 8, i1 false)
tail call void @llvm.lifetime.end(i64 16, i8* %2)
ret void
}
````

Fixes #15665