Am 10.11.2022 um 19:10 schrieb J. Gareth Moreton via fpc-devel:
Hi everyone,
This has been something that has been on my mind for a while now, but
with my increasingly more complex optimisations being developed for
the Free Pascal Compiler and the code becoming an ever bigger
spiderweb of conditions, it got me to start wondering... might
compiler optimisation be a candidate for AI? Often I try to
hand-optimise assembly language to get the same output in fewer cycles
(and fewer bytes too if possible), and then see if I can program the
compiler to match it. I can't hope to catch every possible
optimisation though, and I wonder if using an AI in some way to
develop more efficient machine code has ever been a serious contender
for research. I have heard of stories like the Deepmind AI finding a
faster way to multiply matrices, so it seems logical that it can
improve instruction processes.
You still need to feed the model with the necessary rules and with
necessary training data of both correct and incorrect approaches.
But even then *I* wouldn't want to have any of that black box mambo
jumbo in FPC, cause when a bug occurs in the optimizations due to some
decision the model made... well... tough luck. With the current approach
you need to bash your head a bit against the next wall to find the
location of the issue, but with a machine learning approach (let's not
call it AI, cause there's nothing “intelligent” about that) you can't
even do that. You can only fiddle with what you fed into the model and
hope for the best (and wonder why it now fails at a completely different
area).
Regards,
Sven
_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org
https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
