This has a number of advantages compared to creating a copy in memory
and passing a pointer. The obvious one is that we don't have to put the
data into memory but can keep it in registers. Since we're currently
passing a pointer anyway (instead of using e.g. a known offset on the
stack, which is what the `byval` attribute would achieve), we only use a
single additional register for each fat pointer, but save at least two
pointers worth of stack in exchange (sometimes more because more than
one copy gets eliminated). On archs that pass arguments on the stack, we
save a pointer worth of stack even without considering the omitted
copies.
Additionally, LLVM can optimize the code a lot better, to a large degree
due to the fact that lots of copies are gone or can be optimized away.
Additionally, we can now emit attributes like nonnull on the data and/or
vtable pointers contained in the fat pointer, potentially allowing for
even more optimizations.
This results in LLVM passes being about 3-7% faster (depending on the
crate), and the resulting code is also a few percent smaller, for
example:
text data filename
5671479 3941461 before/librustc-d8ace771.so
5447663 3905745 after/librustc-d8ace771.so
1944425 2394024 before/libstd-d8ace771.so
1896769 2387610 after/libstd-d8ace771.so
I had to remove a call in the backtrace-debuginfo test, because LLVM can
now merge the tails of some blocks when optimizations are turned on,
which can't correctly preserve line info.
Fixes#22924
Cc #22891 (at least for fat pointers the code is good now)
f777562eab