Next steps for reducing overall compilation time

compiler
2

Let me re-post a list of ideas from an earlier post, slightly extended:

  • End-to-end queries
    • Right now, parsing + macro-expansion + name-resolution are not part of the query system and incremental can’t do anything with them
    • Creating the incremental infrastructure from the start would let us start to change that
    • This would be very useful for RLS integration of queries, I think
    • However, this “session” code is grungy and old and I think this is probably non-trivial. We sketched out some plans at Rust All Hands, I’d have to go back to our notes, but I remember the conclusion was “this will be work”.
    • This is also one place where the libsyntax2 story definitely intesects
  • Parallelize the compiler (tracking issue)
    • @Zoxc did awesome work enabling us to parallelize the compiler
    • But the last mile isn’t done! There were various refactorings and architectural changes we wanted to make as well.
    • It is not integrated with incremental, either
    • We’ve not done much measuring of perf
  • Multicrate sessions
    • The “full vision” for queries is that we should be able to compile many crates at once, as I talked about earlier
    • This might allow us to skip a lot of work
  • MIR-only rlibs (tracking issue)
    • Right now, our rlibs contain actual executable code
    • The idea here is that we just store MIR in the rlibs so that we can do a better job reducing duplicates and so forth
  • Erasing types where possible
    • We’ve often discussed (most recently here) the idea of erasing types (to reduce monomorphization overhead) when we can tell it’s safe. This is a big job but a worthwhile one.
  • Optimizations:
    • Optimizing on the MIR level saves work for LLVM. Plus we can do things it can’t. This might start with inlining plus propagating stuff we know to be immutable because of &T types, as well as CSE and copy-prop like things that should eliminate a lot of memcopies.
    • The main goal here is improving compilation time: LLVM probably does most of this already, if not all of it, but it takes longer to do it, and it does it post-monomorphization (hence: many times).
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