Insight into the DMD back-end

[%u]

Yay for more comments like this one.

Don 2010-12-06 11:53:27 PST
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Bearophile -- That's an interesting [automatic fuzzy testing]link. Currently,
DMD back-end bugs are
being found at the rate of about 3 per year. So yes, fuzzy testing of DMC could
probably flush out some backend bugs a bit faster.
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Here's what's happening. First, in this code:

    for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
        foo(i * 5 - 6);
    }
it sees that i and 10 are always >=0, so the signed comparison "i < 10" is
replaced with an unsigned one. (This happens in the backend in constprop() ).
Then, while dealing with loop invariants, it rewrites the loop into:

for (int _i2 = -6; _i2 < 10*5 - 6; _i2 += 5)
{
  foo(_i2);
}

Fine. Except that it had changed the comparison into an unsigned one!
Particularly interesting is the case where the call is foo(i*5-50);
Then, the loop becomes:
for (int _i2 = -50; _i2 < 0; _i2 += 5)

Since an unsigned value is NEVER less than zero, it just drops the loop
completely!

Nasty.
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http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5294