Clarify wording in the LangRef around !invariant.load
Clarify the wording around !invariant.load to properly reflect the semantics of such loads with respect to control dependence and location lifetime. To the best of my knowledge, the revised wording respects the actual implementation and understanding of issues involved highlighted in the recent 'Optimization hints for "constant" loads' thread on LLVMDev.
In particular, I'm aiming for the following results:
- To clarify that an invariant.load can fault and must respect control dependence. In particular, it is not sound to unconditionally pull an invariant load out of a loop if that loop would potentially never execute.
- To clarify that the invariant nature of a given pointer does not preclude the modification of that location through a pointer which is unrelated to the load operand. In particular, initializing a location and then passing a pointer through an opaque intrinsic which produces a new unrelated pointer, should behave as expected provided that the intrinsic is memory dependent on the initializing store.
- To clarify that storing a value to an invariant location is defined. It can not, for example, be considered unreachable. The value stored can be assumed to be equal to the value of any previous (or following!) invariant load, but the store itself is defined.
I recommend that anyone interested in using !invariant.load, or optimizing for them, read over the discussion in the review thread. A number of motivating examples are discussed.
Differential Revision: http://reviews.llvm.org/D6346
llvm-svn: 222700