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Animats 6 hours ago

There's a discussion of "delayed bounds checking", but not "hoisted bounds checking", where bounds checking is done early. Consider

    let mut tab: [usize;100] = [0;100];
    ...
    for i in 0..101 {
        tab[i] = i;
    }
This must panic at i=100. Panic becomes inevitable at entry to the loop. Is the compiler entitled to generate a check that will panic at loop entry? The slides suggest that Rust does not hoist such checks, and, so, with nested loops, it has trouble getting checks out of the loop, which prevents vectorization.
simonask an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Panics in Rust do not currently time-travel like that (including panics from failed bounds checks), and that's a good thing. The reason is that panicking does not imply terminating the process - they can be caught and handled, just like exceptions in C++. In fact, they use the same stack unwinding mechanism by default.

What the compiler is allowed to do is to shorten the loop by one and unconditionally panic after the loop, but this falls under the purview of the LLVM optimizer.

jojomodding an hour ago | parent [-]

Once it shortens the loop, the compiler can also observe that `tab` is a local variable and therefore move the writes up "to the initializer." It can then see that the variable is unused and delete it, and also delete the loop.

afdbcreid 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Currently LLVM cannot do that because the panic message includes the erroneous index. You can do it manually though if you add `_ = tab[100]`.

Even if the panic message would not include the index, LLVM was unable to do that if the previous iterations had side effects (for example if `tab` is not a local variable).