Walking around the compiler | Hacker News Reader

Walking around the compiler

bernsteinbear.com

52 pointschunkles11 comments

I don't understand why this article invents and explains a phony ranged-float fix when the real fix from the footnotes would have been just as simple to explain. The deception needlessly undermines the main point of the article, which I completely agree with.

That fix has limited applicability. x * x is also a non-negative float. But abs(x * x) is not optimized. Or abs(abs(x)+1). GCC, for example, does know that.

The real fix felt more complicated when I drafted this. Seems like it isn't; I'll think about updating the post

I know about nothing about PyPy internals but

  case float_abs(_):
  -          return float
  +          return float.with_range(low=0, high=None)

to me, looks like a risky change. I would fear this could introduce a bug when computing

  isNaN(abs(NaN))

That should return true, but with that change, I fear it could return false because it informs the optimizer that abs never returns a NaN.

Where'd you get that patch from? I can't find it in the blog post.

EDIT: Ah, other comment mentions article was edited.

That shouldn't mean that it doesn't return a NaN. Things are generally not optimized away because of NaNs. E.g. in GCC, abs(c) > -1.0 is not folded, unless building with -ffast-math

Random note since Godbolt was mentioned: It's also fun to hop on play.rust-lang.org and see what different IRs look like via the "..." next to "RUN." Just look at how simple the HIR is pretty simple for "Hello world" - then check out the MIR ;)

> surely the optimizer can reason that the float_abs operation produces a positive number!

how?

By having knowledge baked into it about its properties (which it can validly do because the behaviour of the float_abs operation is specified by the language; it's not calling an arbitrary external function). The blog post sketches out one approach to this: as the optimizer is working on a tree of expressions, it has attached to the nodes extra information about the values in it (e.g. "this is a constant X" or "this value is definitely in the range A..B"); then as it simplifies the tree, it can say "abs of a value that's already definitely not negative is a no-op, don't do anything", in the same way it can say "multiplying X by 1 is a no-op".

The actual bug-fix linked to in the footnote does it in a slightly different way: it says "as I'm walking through optimizing my tree of expressions, if I see 'abs(abs(X))' then simplify the tree to just 'abs(X)'".

> the behaviour of the float_abs operation is specified by the language

Which language? Where? I just googled for float_abs and got nothing.

PyPy intermediate representation. I assume this is what PyPy turns Python "abs(x)" into in codepaths where it knows x is a float.

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