Event: 2023 EuroLLVM Developers Meeting

It is a truth universally acknowledged that representing LLVMs debug-info with intrinsics is a poor design, slowing compile-time performance and creating new categories of bugs. However, removing them is not easy as our APIs lack a way of describing instruction positions from outside of the instruction list. In this talk I'll illustrate what's bad about the current design and explore the design space of possible solutions. I'll also suggest what information a new instruction-movement API would need to maintain debug-info if we didn't use intrinsics. Having a more precise API for describing instruction movement will ease the work of pass authors in getting debug-info correct, and rid optimisation passes of many footguns.

Duration: 24 minutes