1 HiPE Release Notes

This document describes the changes made to HiPE.

1.1 Hipe 3.8

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fix hipe bug causing minor heap corruption related to binary matching. The bug has not been confirmed as the cause of any actual fault symptom.

Own Id: OTP-9182
Enable HiPE by default when compiling for PPC64

Own Id: OTP-9198
Fix handling of <<_:N,_:_*M>> type expressions Fix the argument of erlang:list_to_bitstring/1 Remove unneeded function 'sequence/2' Same functionality provided by string:join/2.

Own Id: OTP-9277

1.2 Hipe 3.7.9

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fix erroneous fail info of a hipe_bs_primop

Own Id: OTP-9036
The change fixes a bug in the translation of 'bs_add' BEAM instruction to HiPE's Icode representation. When these instructions appeared in a guard context the previous translation was obviously buggy.

Own Id: OTP-9044
Sanitize the specs of the code module

After the addition of unicode_binary() to the file:filename() type, dialyzer started complaining about erroneous or incomplete specs in some functions of the 'code' module. The culprit was hard-coded information in erl_bif_types for functions of this module, which were not updated. Since these functions have proper specs these days and code duplication (pun intended) is never a good idea, their type information was removed from erl_bif_types.

While doing this, some erroneous comments were fixed in the code module and also made sure that the code now runs without dialyzer warnings even when the -Wunmatched_returns option is used.

Some cleanups were applied to erl_bif_types too.

Own Id: OTP-9100
Fix bug in the simplification of inexact comparisons

On 31/1/2011 Paul Guyot reported a bug in the native code compilation of inexact equality/inequality tests between floats and integers. The relevant test was:

f(X) -> Y = X / 2, Y == 0.

and hipe erroneously evaluated the calls f(0) and f(0.0) to 'false'.

The culprit was in the simplification code of the Icode range analysis which used an erroneous test (lists:any/1 instead of lists:all/1).

Own Id: OTP-9101
Document exiting and garbage_collecting process statuses

Own Id: OTP-9102
Remove hipe constants pool

Hipe constants used to be allocated within a single, fixed-size pool for interaction with the garbage collector. However, the garbage collector no longer depends on constants being allocated within a single pool, and the fixed size of the pool both meant unnecessary allocations on most deployments and crashes on deployments requiring more constants.

The code was simplified to directly invoke erts_alloc. Debugging and undocumented function hipe_bifs:show_literals/0 was removed (it returned true and output text to the console), and debugging and undocumented function hipe_bifs:constants_size/0 was rewritten with a global to count the size of allocated constants.

Own Id: OTP-9128

1.3 Hipe 3.7.8.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Several type specifications for standard libraries were wrong in the R14B01 release. This is now corrected. The corrections concern types in re,io,filename and the module erlang itself.

Own Id: OTP-9008

1.4 Hipe 3.7.8

Improvements and New Features

Compiler warnings were eliminated.

Own Id: OTP-8855

1.5 Hipe 3.7.7

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The HiPE compiler could crash when compiling certain modules (the bug has been latent, and been exposed by new optimizations introduced in the BEAM compiler in R14A). (Thanks to Mikael Pettersson.)

Own Id: OTP-8800
hipe:load/1 was broken. (Thanks to Paul Guyot.)

Own Id: OTP-8802

1.6 Hipe 3.7.6

Improvements and New Features

receive statements that can only read out a newly created reference are now specially optimized so that it will execute in constant time regardless of the number of messages in the receive queue for the process. That optimization will benefit calls to gen_server:call(). (See gen:do_call/4 for an example of a receive statement that will be optimized.)

Own Id: OTP-8623
Various changes to dialyzer-related files for R14.

- Dialyzer properly supports the new attribute -export_type and checks that remote types only refer to exported types. A warning is produced if some files/applications refer to types defined in modules which are neither in the PLT nor in the analyzed applications.

- Support for detecting data races involving whereis/1 and unregister/1.

- More precise identification of the reason(s) why a record construction violates the types declared for its fields.

- Fixed bug in the handling of the 'or' guard.

- Better handling of the erlang:element/2 BIF.

- Complete handling of Erlang BIFs.

Own Id: OTP-8699
eprof has been reimplemented with support in the Erlang virtual machine and is now both faster (i.e. slows down the code being measured less) and scales much better. In measurements we saw speed-ups compared to the old eprof ranging from 6 times (for sequential code that only uses one scheduler/core) up to 84 times (for parallel code that uses 8 cores).

Note: The API for the eprof has been cleaned up and extended. See the documentation.

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-8706

1.7 Hipe 3.7.5

Improvements and New Features

The documentation is now possible to build in an open source environment after a number of bugs are fixed and some features are added in the documentation build process.

- The arity calculation is updated.

- The module prefix used in the function names for bif's are removed in the generated links so the links will look like "http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erlang.html#append_element-2" instead of "http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erlang.html#erlang:append_element-2".

- Enhanced the menu positioning in the html documentation when a new page is loaded.

- A number of corrections in the generation of man pages (thanks to Sergei Golovan)

- The legal notice is taken from the xml book file so OTP's build process can be used for non OTP applications.

Own Id: OTP-8343

1.8 Hipe 3.7.4

Improvements and New Features

The documentation is now built with open source tools (xsltproc and fop) that exists on most platforms. One visible change is that the frames are removed.

Own Id: OTP-8201
Misc updates.

Own Id: OTP-8301

1.9 Hipe 3.7.3

Improvements and New Features

Various small bugs (one involving the handling of large binaries) were corrected and some additions to its functionality and/or code cleanups were done.

Own Id: OTP-8189

1.10 Hipe 3.7.2

Improvements and New Features

Miscellanous updates.

Own Id: OTP-8038

1.11 Hipe 3.7.1

Improvements and New Features

Minor updates and bug fixes.

Own Id: OTP-7958

1.12 Hipe 3.7

Improvements and New Features

Miscellaneous updates.

Own Id: OTP-7877

1.13 Hipe 3.6.9

Improvements and New Features

The --disable-hipe option for the configure will now completely disable the hipe run-time in the emulator, as is the expected behaviour.

Own Id: OTP-7631

1.14 Hipe 3.6.8

Improvements and New Features

Minor updates.

Own Id: OTP-7522

1.15 Hipe 3.6.7

Improvements and New Features

Minor changes.

Own Id: OTP-7388

1.16 Hipe 3.6.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

A fix for an #include problem which caused the FP exception test to fail unnecessarily on debian/glibc-2.7/x86 systems.

Added SIGFPE loop detection to the FP exception test. This prevents the test from looping indefinitely, which could happen when the CPU is supported (so we can enable FP exceptions on it) but the OS isn't (so we can't write a proper SIGFPE handler). x86 on an unsupported OS is known to have had this problem.

Own Id: OTP-7254

Improvements and New Features

HiPE now also supports little-endian ARM processors.

Own Id: OTP-7255

1.17 Hipe 3.6.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

HIPE: Corrected the choice of interface to the send/3 and setnode/3 BIFs for native-compiled code. Using the incorrect interface could, in unusual circumstances, lead to random runtime errors.

Own Id: OTP-7067

Improvements and New Features

The HiPE compiler's SPARC backend has been rewritten, improving its correctness and long-term maintainability.

Own Id: OTP-7133

1.18 Hipe 3.6.3

Improvements and New Features

Minor Makefile changes.

Own Id: OTP-6689
Miscellanous updates.

Own Id: OTP-6738

1.19 Hipe 3.6.2

Improvements and New Features

Miscellanous improvements.

Own Id: OTP-6577

1.20 Hipe 3.6.1.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Dialyzer could fail to analyze certain beam files that used try/catch.

Own Id: OTP-6449 Aux Id: seq10563

1.21 Hipe 3.6.1

Improvements and New Features

HiPE runtime system:

* added notes about supported systems to README

* support 32-bit x86 on FreeBSD

* autoenable HiPE on FreeBSD (32-bit x86) and Solaris (64-bit x86)

* updated x86 runtime system to support glibc-2.5

* work around probable gcc-4.1.1 bug affecting the x86 runtime system

HiPE compiler:

* improved performance of integer multiplications on all platforms

* corrected a code optimisation error in R11B-2 that broke some bsl/bsr operations on all platforms

* corrected a type error in the ARM backend which could cause the compiler to crash

* corrected an error in the SPARC backend's naive register allocator which could throw the compiler into an infinite loop

Own Id: OTP-6423

1.22 Hipe 3.6.0

Improvements and New Features

Support for native code on Solaris 10/AMD64.

Support for native code on FreeBSD/AMD64.

Native code now handles external funs (fun M:F/A). Native code can now also apply so-called tuple-funs ({M,F}). (Tuple funs are NOT recommended for new code; they are deprecated and will be removed in some future release.)

Own Id: OTP-6305

1.23 Hipe 3.5.6

Improvements and New Features

Improved compilation of receives for the SMP runtime system.

Improved code quality in HiPE compiler on ARM.

Fix bug in handling of re-raised exceptions in try-catch.

(HiPE loader) When native code is incompatible with the current runtime system, fall back to loading the BEAM code.

Own Id: OTP-6127