Partitions were filled by a hash of each function's name, so most calls
crossed partitions and the thin link imported their small callees into
nearly every partition. The emitter now writes a "; scriptc-group" line
before the functions of each source file, and the text partitioner places
a group's functions together: a group larger than the mean partition, or
than 1 MiB, is divided into a power of two of chunks by name, and chunks
go, largest first, to the lighter of two partitions chosen by hash. The
1 MiB bound keeps the code a partition optimizes together, and the
inlining within it, from growing when a program has fewer partitions.
Modules with fewer than 32 partitions, and functions without a group,
keep their name-hash placement: with few partitions per core, the balance
of the largest partitions decides the build time more than the imports.
The placement still depends only on the module text and the partition
count.
The emitter writes interface dispatch tables one element per line. The
helper's text partitioner accepted only single-line globals, so any
program with such a table (every partitioned program with class
interfaces) fell back to parsing the whole module before splitting it
with LLVM. The text partitioner now reads a global whose aggregate
initializer opens at the end of its line and closes on a line that holds
only the closing bracket.
Those programs now parse their partitions concurrently and keep the text
partitioner's placement, so an edit to one function changes only that
function's partition again.
The helper keeps an internal function that exactly one other function
references in its referrer's partition, so the partition can inline it.
A program's module initializers are each called only from the entry
point, so all of them, with every single-use helper they call, shared
the entry point's partition. In the three.js nodes fixture that
partition held 1.1 million lines of LLVM IR, almost five times the
average, and set the native build's longest compile.
A function whose body is larger than 256 KiB of LLVM text is past
LLVM's inline cost limit even for the only call to a local function, so
it is now placed by the hash of its own name. Its own single-use
callees still stay with it.
Large executables were simplified and inlined as one module before the
optimizer split them, so most of a release build ran on a single core,
and any edit recompiled the whole program.
The LLVM helper now divides the program before optimization. It splits
the emitter's assembly text directly, so partitions also parse
concurrently, and falls back to LLVM's module splitter for any input
outside the emitter's grammar. Internal functions referenced by a single
function stay with that function, and globals stay with their first user.
Optimized partitions follow the ThinLTO model: each is simplified and
summarized on its own thread, a thin link imports small functions across
partitions for inlining and returns unexported hidden definitions to
internal linkage, then each partition is optimized and compiled on its
own thread. Unoptimized partitions compile independently, so dev builds
of large programs are parallel too.
A private per-helper cache directory stores simplified partitions under
the hash of their source and objects under the hash of the module after
importing, so a rebuild recompiles only the partitions an edit can
affect. To keep unchanged partitions identical across edits, each
partition numbers its metadata in first-use order, lists only the debug
compile units it uses, and orders declarations by name, and interned
string constants are named by their content rather than first-use order.
Partition counts are powers of two that depend only on the module size,
up to 64, so output stays the same on every host and functions keep
their partition across ordinary edits. LLVM text that arrives in parts is
written in large batches and handed to the helper in place instead of
being written a second time.
Chris Tate