Unfortunately, while doing this I found that it doesn't actually apply
in any real-world programs (tested with `make smoketest`), apparently
because nil pointer checking messes with the functionattrs pass. I hope
to fix that after moving to LLVM 9, which has an optimization that makes
nil pointer checking easier to implement.
Also add unit tests.
This is the first of several transformation (optimization/lowering)
passes that I'd like to move to the new transform package. This
separates the compiler from the optimizer.
Also, it finally adds unit tests for the compiler, not just end-to-end
compilation tests. This should improve robustness and should make it
easier to change these transformation passes in the future.
While the heap-to-stack transform is relatively simple, other passes are
much more complex. Adding unit tests not only helps robustness over
time, but also doubles as documentation as to what these transformation
passes do exactly.
Jaden Weiss
Ayke van Laethem