Re:Mid-stack inlining in the Go compiler
by pcwalton on Monday March 06, 2017 @05:33PM
(#13806691)
> This is relatively easy to do in Go compared to other languages because packages must form a DAG.
That doesn't make sense to me. The complicated part is storing the IR in packages in a form that can be read back into the compiler later. That's needed to do inlining at all. Once you have that done, doing LTO is trivial: you just slurp your IR for all modules linked together into the compiler and emit a single binary. (You can be fancier, like ThinLTO does, but again, the effort needed to do ThinLTO is independent of whether you have cyclic dependencies or not.)
That doesn't make sense to me. The complicated part is storing the IR in packages in a form that can be read back into the compiler later. That's needed to do inlining at all. Once you have that done, doing LTO is trivial: you just slurp your IR for all modules linked together into the compiler and emit a single binary. (You can be fancier, like ThinLTO does, but again, the effort needed to do ThinLTO is independent of whether you have cyclic dependencies or not.)