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Initial work on validating "constexpr"-ness in IR (shader-slang#420)
* Initial work on validating "constexpr"-ness in IR
The underlying issue here is that certain operations in the target shading languages constrain their operands to be compile-time constants. A notable example is the optional texel offset parameter to the `Texture2D.Sample` operation.
When calling these operations in GLSL, the user is required to pass a "constant expression," and any variables in that expression must therefore be marked with the `const` qualifier (and themselves be initialized with constant expressions). Any GLSL output we generate must of course respect these rules.
When calling these operations in HLSL, the user is not so constrained. Instead, they can pass an arbitrary expression, which may involve ordinary variables with no particular markup, and then the compiler is responsible for determining if the actual value after simplification works out to be a constant. In some cases, the requirement that a value be constant might actually trigger things like loop unrolling. Also, it is okay to use a function parameter to determine such a constant expression, as long as the argument turns out to be a constant at all call sites.
The way we have decided to tackle these challenges in Slang is that we we propagate a notion of `constexpr`-ness through the IR. This is currently being tackled in `ir-constexpr.cpp` with a combination of forward and backward iterative dataflow:
* When the operands to an instruction are all `constexpr`, and the opcode is one we believe can be constant-folded, then we infer that the instruction *can* be evaluated as `constexpr`
* When instruction is required to be `constexpr`, then we infer that all of its operands are also required to be `constexpr`.
If this process ever infers that a function parameter is required to be `constexpr`, then we might have to continue propagation at all the call sites to that function.
If after all the propagation is done, there are any cases where an instruction is *required* to be `constexpr`, but it *can't* be `constexpr` (we weren't able to infer `constexpr`-ness for its operands), then we issue an error.
This implementation encodes the idea of `constexpr`-ness in the IR as part of the type system, using a simplified notion of rates. This change adds a `RateQualifiedType` that can represent `@R T`, and then introduces a `ConstExprRate` that can be used for `R`. Many accessors for the type information on IR nodes were updated to distinguish when one wants the "full" type of an IR value (which might include rate information) vs. just the "data" type.
A `constexpr` qualifier was added in the front-end, and is being used to decorate the texel offset parameter for `Texture2D.Sample`. Lowering from AST to IR looks for this qalifier and infers when a function parameter must be typed as `@ConstExpr T` instead of just `T`.
There are lots of limitations and gotchas in the implementation so far:
* The `@ConstExpr` rate is the only one added in this change, but it seems clear that the conceptual `ThreadGroup` rate that was added to represent `groupshared` should probably get folded into the representation.
* I'm not 100% pleased with how many places in the IR I have to special-case for rate-qualified types. At the same type, pulling out rate as a distinct field on `IRValue` would probably require that we pay attention to rate everywhere.
* I've added a test case to show that we can issue errors when users fail to provide a constant expression for the texel offset, but the actual error message isn't great because it doesn't indicate *why* a constant expression was required. Realistically the "initial IR" should contain a few more decorations we can use to relate error conditions back to the original code (even if this is in a side-band structure).
* I've added a test case that is supposed to show that we can back-propagate `constexpr`-ness to local variables, and I've manually confirmed that it works for Vulkan/SPIR-V output, but the level of Vulkan support in `render_test` today means I can't enable the test for check-in.
* While I'm attempting to propagate `@ConstExpr` information from callees to callers, I haven't implemented any logic to specialize callee functions based on values at call sites.
* In a similar vein, there is no handling of control-flow dependence in the current code. If we infer that a phi (block parameter) needs to be `@ConstExpr`, then it isn't actually enough to require that the inputs to the phi (arguments from predecessor blocks) are all `@ConstExpr` because we also need any control-flow decisions that pick which incoming edge we take to be `@ConstExpr` as well.
* As a practical matter, implicit propagation of `@ConstExpr` from a function body to a function parameter should only be allowed for functions that are "local" to a module. Any function that might be accessed from outside of a module should really have had its `@ConstExpr` parameter marked manually, and our pass should validate that they follow their own rules. Right now we have no kind of visibility (`public` vs `private`) system, so I'm kind of ignoring this issue.
While that is a lot of gaps, this is also just enough code to get the Falcor MultiPassPostProcess example working, so I'm inclined to get it checked in.
* Fixup: missing expected output for test
* Fixup: disable test that relies on [unroll] for now
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