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Russ Cox ca9975a45e cmd/gc: handle non-escaping address-taken variables better
This CL makes the bitmaps a little more precise about variables
that have their address taken but for which the address does not
escape to the heap, so that the variables are kept in the stack frame
rather than allocated on the heap.

The code before this CL handled these variables by treating every
return statement as using every such variable and depending on
liveness analysis to essentially treat the variable as live during the
entire function. That approach has false positives and (worse) false
negatives. That is, it's both sloppy and buggy:

        func f(b1, b2 bool) {	// x live here! (sloppy)
                if b2 {
                        print(0) // x live here! (sloppy)
                        return
                }
                var z **int
                x := new(int)
                *x = 42
                z = &x
                print(**z) // x live here (conservative)
                if b2 {
                        print(1) // x live here (conservative)
                        return
                }
                for {
                        print(**z) // x not live here (buggy)
                }
        }

The first two liveness annotations (marked sloppy) are clearly
wrong: x cannot be live if it has not yet been declared.

The last liveness annotation (marked buggy) is also wrong:
x is live here as *z, but because there is no return statement
reachable from this point in the code, the analysis treats x as dead.

This CL changes the liveness calculation to mark such variables
live exactly at points in the code reachable from the variable
declaration. This keeps the conservative decisions but fixes
the sloppy and buggy ones.

The CL also detects ambiguously live variables, those that are
being marked live but may not actually have been initialized,
such as in this example:

        func f(b1 bool) {
                var z **int
                if b1 {
                        x := new(int)
                        *x = 42
                        z = &x
                } else {
                        y := new(int)
                        *y = 54
                        z = &y
                }
                print(**z) // x, y live here (conservative)
        }

Since the print statement is reachable from the declaration of x,
x must conservatively be marked live. The same goes for y.
Although both x and y are marked live at the print statement,
clearly only one of them has been initialized. They are both
"ambiguously live".

These ambiguously live variables cause problems for garbage
collection: the collector cannot ignore them but also cannot
depend on them to be initialized to valid pointer values.

Ambiguously live variables do not come up too often in real code,
but recent changes to the way map and interface runtime functions
are invoked has created a large number of ambiguously live
compiler-generated temporary variables. The next CL will adjust
the analysis to understand these temporaries better, to make
ambiguously live variables fairly rare.

Once ambiguously live variables are rare enough, another CL will
introduce code at the beginning of a function to zero those
slots on the stack. At that point the garbage collector and the
stack copying routines will be able to depend on the guarantee that
if a slot is marked as live in a liveness bitmap, it is initialized.

R=khr
CC=golang-codereviews, iant
https://golang.org/cl/51810043
2014-01-16 10:32:30 -05:00
api api: update next.txt 2014-01-14 10:18:43 -08:00
doc runtime: output how long goroutines are blocked 2014-01-16 12:54:46 +04:00
include libmach: use different names for different Ureg types 2014-01-08 20:37:27 -05:00
lib codereview: switch defaultcc to golang-codereviews 2013-12-20 10:53:50 -05:00
misc runtime: co-exist with NPTL's pthread_cancel. 2014-01-09 09:34:04 -08:00
src cmd/gc: handle non-escaping address-taken variables better 2014-01-16 10:32:30 -05:00
test cmd/gc: handle non-escaping address-taken variables better 2014-01-16 10:32:30 -05:00
.hgignore .hgignore: remove duplicate entry 2013-12-12 19:01:50 -08:00
.hgtags tag go1.2 2013-12-02 09:06:41 +11:00
AUTHORS C+A: add email alias for Michael Gehring 2014-01-13 13:57:06 -08:00
CONTRIBUTORS C: add Michael Kelly (Google CLA) 2014-01-14 12:53:06 -08:00
favicon.ico godoc: update favicon 2012-10-11 17:02:36 +11:00
LICENSE doc: update licensing text one more time 2012-03-27 15:09:13 +11:00
PATENTS LICENSE: separate, change PATENTS text 2010-12-06 16:31:59 -05:00
README README: Fix installation instructions 2013-11-20 13:47:37 -08:00
robots.txt godoc: serve robots.txt raw 2011-02-19 05:46:20 +11:00

This is the source code repository for the Go programming language.  

For documentation about how to install and use Go,
visit http://golang.org/ or load doc/install-source.html
in your web browser.

After installing Go, you can view a nicely formatted
doc/install-source.html by running godoc --http=:6060
and then visiting http://localhost:6060/doc/install/source.

Unless otherwise noted, the Go source files are distributed
under the BSD-style license found in the LICENSE file.

--

Binary Distribution Notes

If you have just untarred a binary Go distribution, you need to set
the environment variable $GOROOT to the full path of the go
directory (the one containing this README).  You can omit the
variable if you unpack it into /usr/local/go, or if you rebuild
from sources by running all.bash (see doc/install.html).
You should also add the Go binary directory $GOROOT/bin
to your shell's path.

For example, if you extracted the tar file into $HOME/go, you might
put the following in your .profile:

    export GOROOT=$HOME/go
    export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin

See doc/install.html for more details.