Native Code Generator for AArch64

[Shayne Fletcher]

Outstanding!

On Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 05:43 Moritz Angermann <moritz.angermann at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi there!
>
> As some may know I've been working on a native code generation backend for
> aarch64[1].  When Ben initially wrote about The state of GHC on ARM[2], I
> was quite skeptical if a native code generator would really be what we
> should be doing.  And the claim it would take a week or two, might have
> been underestimating the complexity a bit; but also the time needed to
> debug crashing programs.
>
> The idea of a NCG however intrigued me.  I did work on an alternative llvm
> backend once, so I did know a bit about the code gen backend.  I also knew
> a bit about aarch64 assembly from working on the rts linker for aarch64.
>
> So here we are today, with an aarch64 ncg for ghc[3], that has some basic
> optimizations included, but does not beat the llvm codegen yet in runtime
> performance. It is however substantially faster than the llvm codegen for
> compile time performance.
>
> I have performed nofib benchmarks for:
> - full llvm build vs full native build[4]
> - llvm nofib, with native libraries, vs full native build[5]
> to discriminate effects of compiling just the nofib programs vs. the
> impact the libraries have.
>
> I've only had time to take a cursory look over the generated assembly for
> the CSD test, and the llvm codegen seems to be able to produce quite
> different assembly, thus there seem to be some good optimizations llvm
> manages to exploit. I'll have to investigate this closer and probably look
> at the llvm IR we generate and the intermediate optimization steps llvm
> manages to apply to it, as the llvm assembly doesn't ressemble the ncg
> assembly much.
>
> I plan to look at aarch64/mach-o and performance over the coming weeks.
>
> I hope we can get this in for 9.2.
>
> Cheers,
>  Moritz
>
> --
> [1]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/3641
> [2]: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/blog/20200515-ghc-on-arm.html
> [3]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/3641
> [4]: https://gist.github.com/9d93454b832b769b5bdb4e731a10c068
> [5]: https://gist.github.com/acc4dab7836f1f509716ac398a94d949
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