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Another step forward towards interactive programming

The Compiler Research team is pleased to announce the successful completion of another round of internships focused on enhancements in interactive programming, specifically in relation to the Clang-REPL component in LLVM.

The Compiler Research team includes researchers located at Princeton University and CERN. Our primary goal is best described as follows:

To establish a proficient workflow in LLVM, where interactive development in C++ is possible, and exploratory C++ becomes an accessible experience to a wider audience.

Following are some notable contributions by our interns this year.

Yuquan Fu - Autocompletion in Clang-REPL

Clang-Repl allows developers to program in C++ interactively with a REPL environment. However, it was missing the ability to suggest code completion or auto-complete options for user input, which can be time-consuming and prone to typing errors.

With this code completion system, users can either complete their input quickly or see a list of valid completion candidates. The code completion is also context-aware, providing semantically relevant results based on the current position and input on the current line.

Mentors: Vassil Vassilev (Princeton.edu) & David Lange (Princeton.edu)

Project Details: Autocompletion in Clang-REPL

Funding: Google Summer of Code 2023

Example – avoiding tedious typing

clang-repl> struct WhateverMeaningfulLoooooooooongName{ int field;};
clang-repl> Wh<tab>

With code completion, hitting tab completes the entity name:

clang-repl>  WhateverMeaningfulLoooooooooongName

For implementation details, please see the respective slides and the blog.

Anubhab Ghosh - WebAssembly Support for Clang-Repl

The Xeus Framework enables accessing Clang-REPL (an interpreter that JIT compiles C++ code into native code) in a web browser, using Jupyter. However, this shifts the computational load to the server.

A more scalable approach is to use WebAssembly. It allows sandboxed execution of native (e.g. C/C++/Rust) programs compiled to an intermediate bytecode at closer to native speeds. The idea is to run clang-repl within WebAssembly and generate JIT-compiled WebAssembly code and execute it on the client side.

However, this comes with some challenges (e.g., code in WebAssembly is immutable, which is unacceptable for JIT).

Solution: To address the code immutability issue, a new WebAssembly module is created at each iteration of the REPL loop. Initially, a precompiled module containing the Standard C/C++ libraries, LLVM, Clang, and wasm-ld is sent to the browser, which runs the interpreter and compiles the user code.

Since we cannot call Interpreter::Execute() to execute the module (due to JITLink reliance), the LLVM WebAssembly backend is used manually to produce an object file. This file is then passed to the WebAssembly version of LLD (wasm-ld) to turn it into a shared library which is written to the virtual file system of Emscripten. The dynamic linking facilities of Emscripten can be used to load this library.

Mentors: Vassil Vassilev (Princeton.edu) & Alexander Penev (Uni-Plovdiv.bg)

Project Details: WebAssembly Support for Clang-Repl

Funding: Google Summer of Code 2023

Example:

SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO);
SDL_Window *window;
SDL_Rendered *renderer;
SDL_CreateWindowAndRenderer (300, 300, 0, &window, &renderer);

This should connect to a simple black canvas. Next, we can draw things into it.

SDL_SetRenderDrawColor(renderer, 0x80, 0x00, 0x00, 0xFF);
SDL_Rect rect3 = {.x = 20, .y = 20, .w = 150, .h = 100};
SDL_RenderFillRect(rendered, &rect3);
 
SDL_SetRenderDrawColor(renderer, 0x00, 0x80, 0x00, 0xFF);
SDL_Rect rect4 = {.x = 40, .y = 40, .w = 150, .h = 100};
SDL_RenderFillRect(rendered, &rect4);
 
SDL_RenderPresent(renderer);

The output should look something like this:

Web Assembly Example

Sunho Kim - Re-optimization using JITLink

In order to support re-optimization, the JITLink API was extended by adding the cross-architecture stub creation API. This API works in all platforms and architectures that JITLink supports and through this we can create the redirectable stubs by using JITLink.

Once the re-optimization API was developed, it was time to actually implement re-optimization. A new layer was introduced to support re-optimization of IR modules. There were many abstraction levels where redirection could be implemented, but we ended up doing it at IR level since that brings a lot of re-optimization techniques to be implemented easily by transforming IR directly. From an API perspective, the most flexible abstraction level to do this may be at the FrontEnd AST level.

Clang-Repl relies on LLJIT to do JIT-related tasks. Enabling re-optimization for LLJIT also helped enable it in Clang-Repl. However, there were minor challenges (e.g., mismatch in what clang-repl expects from how the runtime executes the static initializers and how ELF orc runtime runs it). Possible solutions for these are in discussion (e.g., adding a new dl function). Nevertheless, we now have a real-world experimental environment where we can test new re-optimization techniques and perform benchmarks to see if they are useful.

Finally, based on the above infrastructure, profile guided optimization is now possible (by transforming the IR module). There are still some enhancements pending before the code is fully upstreamed, but the current code achieves instrumentation on the orc-runtime side, which simplifies implementation by a lot.

Mentors: Vassil Vassilev (Princeton.edu) & Lang Hames/ lhames (Apple)

Project Details: Re-optimization using JITLink

Funding: Google Summer of Code 2023

Example: Doing the -O2 optimization if function was called more than 10 times

The following example builds a PassManager using the LLVM library and then runs the optimization pipeline.

static Error reoptimizeTo02(ReOptimizeLayer &Parent, ReOptMaterializationUnitID MUID,
    unsigned Curverison, ResourceTrackerSP OldRT, ThreadSafeModule &TSM) {
      TSM.withModuleDo([&]{llvm::Module &M) {
         auto PassManager = buildPassManager();
         PassManager.run(M);
        });
        return Error::success();
}
ReOptLayer ->setReoptimizeFunc(reoptimizeTo02);
ReOptLayer ->setAddProfileFunc(reoptimizeIfCallFrequent);

For more examples, please see the LLVM-JITLink-COFF-Example repo.

Krishna Narayanan - Tutorial development with clang-repl

Open Source documentation is often a neglected area in the software lifecycle. Specifically, this project targeted helping contributors by documenting how they can set up respective environments on their local machines to contribute to the code and documentation of the respective project. These environments were set up locally, tested and then the setup methodology was updated in the relevant documentation.

Besides other compiler research technologies, write-ups were also added to LLVM (specifically the Clang-Repl documentation) as part of this project. Usage examples were also added.

Mentors: Vassil Vassilev (Princeton.edu) & David Lange (Princeton.edu)

Project Details: Tutorial development with clang-repl

Funding: Google Summer of Code 2023

Example

// Classes and Structures
clang-repl> #include <iostream>
clang-repl> class Rectangle {int width, height; public: void set_values (int,int);\
clang-repl... int area() {return width*height;}};
clang-repl>  void Rectangle::set_values (int x, int y) { width = x;height = y;}
clang-repl> int main () { Rectangle rect;rect.set_values (3,4);\
clang-repl... std::cout << "area: " << rect.area() << std::endl;\
clang-repl... return 0;}
clang-repl> main();
area: 12