Swift and GPU Compiler Details
Swift is a safe and efficient systems language with support for generic programming via its static type system. Various existing implementations of generic programming use either a uniform runtime representation for values (e.g., Java generics) or compile-time monomorphization (e.g., C++, Rust). Swift takes a “dictionary-passing” approach, similar to type-classes in Haskell, using reified type metadata to allow generic code to abstract over the memory layout of data types and avoid boxing. In this talk, we will describe the compilation of Swift’s generics from the type checker down to LLVM IR lowering and interaction with the Swift runtime, illustrating the how the core representation of generics flows through the system, from answering type-checking queries to the calling convention of generic functions and runtime representation of the “dictionaries”.
If you’ve seen our Swift generics talk, this document will shed some light on generic signature canonicalization.
See also: Marcin Krzyzanowski’s Slow Swift talk.
Apple LLVM GPU Compiler: Embedded Dragons:
The adoption of LLVM to develop GPU compilers has been increasing substantially over the years, thanks to the flexibility of the LLVM framework. At Apple, we build LLVM-based GPU compilers to serve the embedded GPUs in all our products.The GPU compiler stack is fully LLVM based. In this talk, we will provide an overview of how we leverage LLVM to implement our GPU compiler: in particular we will provide details about the pipeline we use and we will describe some of the custom passes we added to the LLVM framework that we are considering to contribute to the community. Additionally, we will discuss some of the challenges we face in building a fast GPU compiler that generates performant code.
