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+ <title>Pretokenized Headers (PTH)</title>
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+<div id="content">
+<h1>Pretokenized Headers</h1>
+
+<p> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precompiled_header">Precompiled
+headers</a> is a general approach employed by many compilers to reduce
+compilation time. The underlying motivation of the approach is that within a
+codebase frequently the same (and often large) header files are included by
+multiple source files. Consequently, compile times can often be greatly improved
+by caching some of the (redundant) work done by a compiler to process headers.
+Precompiled header files, which represent one of possibly many ways to implement
+this optimization, are literally files that represent an on-disk cache that
+contains the vital information necessary to reduce some (or all) of the work
+needed to process a corresponding header file. While details of precompiled
+headers vary between compilers, precompiled headers have been shown to be a
+highly effective at speeding up program compilation on systems with very large
+system headers (e.g., Mac OS X).</p>
+
+<p>Clang supports an implementation of precompiled headers known as
+<em>pre-tokenized headers</em> (PTH). Clang's pre-tokenized headers support most
+of same interfaces as GCC's pre-compiled headers (as well as others) but are
+completely different in their implementation. This pages first describes the
+interface for using PTH and then briefly elaborates on their design and
+implementation.</p>
+
+
+<h2>Using Pretokenized Headers (High-level Interface)</h2>
+
+<p>The high-level interface to generate a PTH file is the same as GCC's:</p>
+
+<pre>
+ $ gcc -x c-header test.h -o test.h.gch
+ $ clang -x c-header test.h -o test.h.pth
+</pre>
+
+<p>A PTH file can then be used as a prefix header when a <tt>-include</tt>
+option is passed to <tt>clang</tt>:</p>
+
+<pre>
+ $ clang -include test.h test.c -o test
+</pre>
+
+<p>The <tt>clang</tt> driver will first check if a PTH file for <tt>test.h</tt>
+is available; if so, the contents of <tt>test.h</tt> (and the files it includes)
+will be processed from the PTH file. Otherwise, <tt>clang</tt> falls back to
+directly processing the content of <tt>test.h</tt>. This mirrors the behavior of
+GCC.</p>
+
+<p><b>NOTE:</b> <tt>clang</tt> does <em>not</em> automatically used PTH files
+for headers that are directly included within a source file. For example:</p>
+
+<pre>
+ $ clang -x c-header test.h -o test.h.pth
+ $ cat test.c
+ #include "test.h"
+ $ clang test.c -o test
+</pre>
+
+<p>In this example, <tt>clang</tt> will not automatically use the PTH file for
+<tt>test.h</tt> since <tt>test.h</tt> was included directly in the source file
+and not specified on the command line using <tt>-include</tt>.</p>
+
+<h2>Using Pretokenized Headers (Low-level Interface)</h2>
+
+<p>The low-level Clang driver, <tt>clang-cc</tt>, supports three command line
+options for generating and using PTH files.<p>
+
+<p>To generate PTH files using <tt>clang-cc</tt>, use the option <tt>-emit-pth</tt>:
+
+<pre>
+ $ clang-cc test.h -emit-pth -o test.h.pth
+</pre>
+
+<p>This option is transparently used by <tt>clang</tt> when generating PTH
+files. Similarly, PTH files can be used as prefix headers using the <tt>-include-pth</tt> option:</p>
+
+<pre>
+ $ clang-cc -include-pth test.h.pth test.c -o test.s
+</pre>
+
+<p>Alternatively, Clang's PTH files can be used as a raw &quot;token-cache&quot;
+(or &quot;content&quot; cache) of the source included by the original header
+file. This means that the contents of the PTH file are searched as substitutes
+for <em>any</em> source files that are used by <tt>clang-cc</tt> to process a
+source file. This is done by specifying the <tt>-token-cache</tt> option:</p>
+
+<pre>
+ $ cat test.h
+ #include<stdio.h>
+ $ clang-cc -emit-pth test.h -o test.h.pth
+ $ cat test.c
+ #include "test.h"
+ $ clang-cc test.c -o test -token-cache test.h.pth
+</pre>
+
+<p>In this example the contents of <tt>stdio.h</tt> (and the files it includes)
+will be retrieved from <tt>test.h.pth</tt>, as the PTH file is being used in
+this case as a raw cache of the contents of <tt>test.h</tt>. This is a low-level
+interface used to both implement the high-level PTH interface as well as to
+provide alternative means to use PTH-style caching.</p>
+
+<h2>PTH Design and Implementation</h2>
+
+<p>Unlike GCC's precompiled headers, which cache the full ASTs and preprocessor
+state of a header file, Clang's pretokenized header files mainly cache the raw
+lexer <em>tokens</em> that are needed to segment the stream of characters in a
+source file into keywords, identifiers, and operators. Consequently, PTH serves
+to mainly directly speed up the lexing and preprocessing of a source file, while
+parsing and type-checking must be completely redone every time a PTH file is
+used.</p>
+
+<h3>Basic Design Tradeoffs</h3>
+
+<p>In the long term there are plans to provide an alternate PCH implementation
+for Clang that also caches the work for parsing and type checking the contents
+of header files. The current implementation of PCH in Clang as pretokenized
+header files was motivated by the following factors:<p>
+
+<ul>
+<li><p><em>Language independence</em>: PTH files are (roughly) language
+independent. They work with any language that Clang's lexer can handle,
+including C, Objective-C, and (in the early stages) C++. This means development
+on language features at the parsing level or above (which is basically almost
+all interesting pieces) does not require PTH to be modified.</p></li>
+
+<li><em>Simple design</em>: Relatively speaking, PTH has a simple design and
+implementation, making it easy to test. Further, because the machinery for PTH
+resides at the lower-levels of the Clang library stack it is fairly
+straightforward to profile and optimize.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>Further, compared to GCC's PCH implementation (which is the dominate
+precompiled header file implementation that Clang can be directly compared
+against) the PTH design in Clang yields several attractive features:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li><p><em>Architecture independence</em>: In contrast to GCC's PCH files (and
+those of several other compilers), Clang's PTH files are architecture
+independent, requiring only a single PTH file when building an program for
+multiple architectures.</p>
+
+<p>For example, on Mac OS X one may wish to
+compile a &quot;universal binary&quot; that runs on PowerPC, 32-bit Intel
+(i386), and 64-bit Intel architectures. In contrast, GCC requires a PCH file for
+each architecture, as the definitions of types in the AST are
+architecture-specific. Since a Clang PTH file essentially represents a lexical
+cache of header files, a single PTH file can be safely used when compiling for
+multiple architectures. This can also reduce compile times because only a single
+PTH file needs to be generated during a build instead of several.</p></li>
+
+<li><p><em>Reduced memory pressure</em>: Similar to GCC,
+Clang reads PTH files via the use of memory mapping (i.e., <tt>mmap</tt>).
+Clang, however, memory maps PTH files as read-only, meaning that multiple
+invocations of <tt>clang-cc</tt> can share the same pages in memory from a
+memory-mapped PTH file. In comparison, GCC also memory maps its PCH files but
+also modifies those pages in memory, incurring the copy-on-write costs. The
+read-only nature of PTH can greatly reduce memory pressure for builds involving
+multiple cores, thus improving overall scalability.</p></li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>Despite these strengths, PTH's simple design suffers some algorithmic
+handicaps compared to other PCH strategies such as those used by GCC. While PTH
+can greatly speed up the processing time of a header file, the amount of work
+required to process a header file is still roughly linear in the size of the
+header file. In contrast, the amount of work done by GCC to process a
+precompiled header is (theoretically) constant (the ASTs for the header are
+literally memory mapped into the compiler). This means that only the pieces of
+the header file that are referenced by the source file including the header are
+the only ones the compiler needs to process during actual compilation. While
+GCC's particular implementation of PCH mitigates some of these algorithmic
+strengths via the use of copy-on-write pages, the approach itself can
+fundamentally dominate at an algorithmic level, especially when one considers
+header files of arbitrary size.</p>
+
+<p>Consequently, as alluded earlier, there are plans to potentially implement an
+alternative PCH implementation for Clang based on the lazy deserialization of
+ASTs. This approach would theoretically have the same constant-time algorithmic
+advantages just mentioned but would also retain some of the strengths of PTH
+such as reduced memory pressure (ideal for multi-core builds).</p>
+
+<h3>Internal PTH Optimizations</h3>
+
+<p>While the main optimization employed by PTH is to reduce lexing time of
+header files by caching pre-lexed tokens, PTH also employs several other
+optimizations to speed up the processing of header files:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li><p><em><tt>stat</tt> caching</em>: PTH files cache information obtained via
+calls to <tt>stat</tt> that <tt>clang-cc</tt> uses to resolve which files are
+included by <tt>#include</tt> directives. This greatly reduces the overhead
+involved in context-switching to the kernel to resolve included files.</p></li>
+
+<li><p><em>Fasting skipping of <tt>#ifdef</tt>...<tt>#endif</tt> chains</em>:
+PTH files record the basic structure of nested preprocessor blocks. When the
+condition of the preprocessor block is false, all of its tokens are immediately
+skipped instead of requiring them to be handled by Clang's
+preprocessor.</p></li>
+
+</ul>
+
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>