2020-06-11

Yesterday, I barely got my feet wet with the beginnings of a liveness analyser for Futhark. Today, the plan is to continue with it.

I didn't get much of anything done today, but Cosmin, Troels, Robert and I had a nice chat at around mid-day. Cosmin doesn't think I need a liveness analysis, with the argument that I should be able to merge memory blocks in one pass without it. Instead, he suggests that I focus on last-use of each variable.

I'm not quite sure I understand his reasoning. No matter what, every time a new array is created, I need to see if there are any existing arrays that are no longer used, and for that I need to analyze the whole program first, right? I'll have to dig deeper tomorrow.

• There's a problem with how the compiler chooses the memory space for loop paramters. The handling of DoLoop in the ExplicitAllocations pass in allocInMergeParams to be specific. Before, we tried to be clever about putting loop parameters in the right memory space, but now everything gets put in global memory. We'd like to put parameters in shared memory whenever possible. Take a look at how the old allocInMergeParams did it, and see if we can do something similar.

Move on with the liveness analysis. Even if I don't end up using it, writing something will help me get an understanding of how writing passes in Futhark works.