noalias is not enough

[gnzlbg]

Somebody on the internet (https://blog.dend.ro/rust-and-the-case-of-the-redundant-comparison/) complained that something like this:

fn vec_clear(x: &mut i32) {
    if *x != 0 {
        *x = 0;
    }
}

generates a conditional store:

    cmpl    $0, (%rdi)
    je      .LBB0_2
    movl    $0, (%rdi)
.LBB0_2:  
    retq

on x86_64 instead of just an unconditional store movl $0, (%rdi); retq.

Taking a look at the optimized LLVM-IR:

define void @vec_clear(i32* noalias nocapture dereferenceable(4) %x) {
start:
  %0 = load i32, i32* %x, align 4
  %1 = icmp eq i32 %0, 0
  br i1 %1, label %bb2, label %bb1

bb1:
  store i32 0, i32* %x, align 4
  br label %bb2

bb2:
  ret void
}

shows the issue.

The LLVM-IR generated by rustc is loosing critical information. It marks i32* as noalias, which means, that no other pointers in vec_clear's scope will alias it. However, outside vec_clear scope, other pointers are allowed to alias that memory. That is, if *x is zero, other threads could be concurrently reading the memory and if LLVM would generate an unconditional store here, that would introduce a data-race, which means that this optimization is not safe on the LLVM-IR generated by rustc. OTOH, &mut i32` means that the pointer has unique access to the memory, that is, no other pointer can access the memory behind it as long as that pointer is alive. Therefore, transforming the code to an unconditional store does not introduce a data-race.

Therefore, I think that noalias is not enough to perform this optimization and that we would need something stronger for LLVM to be able to perform it.

---

This also shows that &mut T is stronger than C's restrict keyword.

[RalfJung]

That is, if *x is zero, other threads could be concurrently reading the memory and if LLVM would generate an unconditional store here, that would introduce a data-race, which means that this optimization is not safe on the LLVM-IR generated by rustc.

Ah, good point. Read-write data races "just" make the read yield undef, but even that would clearly be a misoptimization.

OTOH, &mut i32 means that the pointer has unique access to the memory, that is, no other pointer can access the memory behind it as long as that pointer is alive. Therefore, transforming the code to an unconditional store does not introduce a data-race.

Correct. AFAIK, noalias was never meant to express the full set of properties. It's just the strongest thing LLVM provides.

This also shows that &mut T is stronger than C's restrict keyword.

Oh yes, it is very much stronger in various ways.

[varkor]

Isn't this the sort of thing the noalias and alias.scopes metadata (#16515) allows one to express?

[gnzlbg]

@varkor what would be the scopes for the load and stores in the example?

[varkor]

In this example, as you point out, the aliasing is important with regards to memory accesses outside the function. So if in theory you could mark all the others... I doubt that's sufficient for LLVM though.

[leonardo-m]

Is it a good idea to write a LLVM enhancement request?

[gnzlbg]

As @varkor says, we could mark all others, and we would have to mark all others for every &mut that the programs creates, and even then, this is not something that alias analysis would take into account because no sane language front-end will do this.

Extending LLVM to support this won't be easy either. Currently LLVM hoists memory ops from functions when profitable, but:

// T: Copy
fn foo(x: &mut T) {  
   // in this scope there is only one 
   // pointer to the value behind x
   let y = *x; 
    ... 
}
{
   let mut z = T;
   let ptr = &mut z as *mut T;
   // hoist the load from foo out here
   foo(&mut z);     
   *ptr = T;
}

so when hoisting the load (or store) from foo to the outer scope, the "invariant" that that's the only pointer to the data doesn't hold any more, because in the outer scope there might be other pointers to the data.

So all the optimizations that currently move memory across scope would need to update and be extremely careful with any attribute/metadata that we might want to use.

Maybe a minimal extension to alias analysis that allow us to specify the "opposite" / "negative" aliasing groups would be enough, but one would need to teach many pieces of the pipeline about this for the new information to result in better code gen.

[steveklabnik]

Triage: no idea what the current status of this is, to be honest. I imagine that this was never suggested upstream.

[RalfJung]

Therefore, I think that noalias is not enough to perform this optimization and that we would need something stronger for LLVM to be able to perform it.

If noalias really means "does not alias for the duration of this function call", then I think in fact it would be enough. Unfortunately, noalias scoping in LLVM is basically undocumented, and ti is also buggy so one cannot just go from the implementation.

However, a new round of noalias/restrict patches has been landing recently (https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-March/131127.html, https://reviews.llvm.org/D69542#change-veawD9rpruA2), so maybe that new infrastructure is powerful enough to express the desired guarantee here.

FWIW, Stacked Borrows does allow the optimization.