GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) Internals: Basic Blocks

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### 14.1 Basic Blocks

A basic block is a straight-line sequence of code with only one entry point and only one exit. In GCC, basic blocks are represented using the `basic_block` data type.

Special basic blocks represent possible entry and exit points of a function. These blocks are called `ENTRY_BLOCK_PTR` and `EXIT_BLOCK_PTR`. These blocks do not contain any code.

The `BASIC_BLOCK` array contains all basic blocks in an unspecified order. Each `basic_block` structure has a field that holds a unique integer identifier `index` that is the index of the block in the `BASIC_BLOCK` array. The total number of basic blocks in the function is `n_basic_blocks`. Both the basic block indices and the total number of basic blocks may vary during the compilation process, as passes reorder, create, duplicate, and destroy basic blocks. The index for any block should never be greater than `last_basic_block`. The indices 0 and 1 are special codes reserved for `ENTRY_BLOCK` and `EXIT_BLOCK`, the indices of `ENTRY_BLOCK_PTR` and `EXIT_BLOCK_PTR`.

Two pointer members of the `basic_block` structure are the pointers `next_bb` and `prev_bb`. These are used to keep doubly linked chain of basic blocks in the same order as the underlying instruction stream. The chain of basic blocks is updated transparently by the provided API for manipulating the CFG. The macro `FOR_EACH_BB` can be used to visit all the basic blocks in lexicographical order, except `ENTRY_BLOCK` and `EXIT_BLOCK`. The macro `FOR_ALL_BB` also visits all basic blocks in lexicographical order, including `ENTRY_BLOCK` and `EXIT_BLOCK`.

The functions `post_order_compute` and `inverted_post_order_compute` can be used to compute topological orders of the CFG. The orders are stored as vectors of basic block indices. The `BASIC_BLOCK` array can be used to iterate each basic block by index. Dominator traversals are also possible using `walk_dominator_tree`. Given two basic blocks A and B, block A dominates block B if A is always executed before B.

Each `basic_block` also contains pointers to the first instruction (the head) and the last instruction (the tail) or end of the instruction stream contained in a basic block. In fact, since the `basic_block` data type is used to represent blocks in both major intermediate representations of GCC (`GIMPLE` and RTL), there are pointers to the head and end of a basic block for both representations, stored in intermediate representation specific data in the `il` field of `struct basic_block_def`.

For RTL, these pointers are `BB_HEAD` and `BB_END`.

In the RTL representation of a function, the instruction stream contains not only the “real” instructions, but also notes or insn notes (to distinguish them from reg notes). Any function that moves or duplicates the basic blocks needs to take care of updating of these notes. Many of these notes expect that the instruction stream consists of linear regions, so updating can sometimes be tedious. All types of insn notes are defined in `insn-notes.def`.

In the RTL function representation, the instructions contained in a basic block always follow a `NOTE_INSN_BASIC_BLOCK`, but zero or more `CODE_LABEL` nodes can precede the block note. A basic block ends with a control flow instruction or with the last instruction before the next `CODE_LABEL` or `NOTE_INSN_BASIC_BLOCK`. By definition, a `CODE_LABEL` cannot appear in the middle of the instruction stream of a basic block.

In addition to notes, the jump table vectors are also represented as “pseudo-instructions” inside the insn stream. These vectors never appear in the basic block and should always be placed just after the table jump instructions referencing them. After removing the table-jump it is often difficult to eliminate the code computing the address and referencing the vector, so cleaning up these vectors is postponed until after liveness analysis. Thus the jump table vectors may appear in the insn stream unreferenced and without any purpose. Before any edge is made fall-thru, the existence of such construct in the way needs to be checked by calling `can_fallthru` function.

For the `GIMPLE` representation, the PHI nodes and statements contained in a basic block are in a `gimple_seq` pointed to by the basic block intermediate language specific pointers. Abstract containers and iterators are used to access the PHI nodes and statements in a basic blocks. These iterators are called GIMPLE statement iterators (GSIs). Grep for `^gsi` in the various `gimple-*` and `tree-*` files. The following snippet will pretty-print all PHI nodes the statements of the current function in the GIMPLE representation.

    basic_block bb;

    FOR_EACH_BB (bb)
      {
       gimple_stmt_iterator si;

       for (si = gsi_start_phis (bb); !gsi_end_p (si); gsi_next (&si))
         {
           gimple phi = gsi_stmt (si);
           print_gimple_stmt (dump_file, phi, 0, TDF_SLIM);
         }
       for (si = gsi_start_bb (bb); !gsi_end_p (si); gsi_next (&si))
         {
           gimple stmt = gsi_stmt (si);
           print_gimple_stmt (dump_file, stmt, 0, TDF_SLIM);
         }
      }

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