Temporaries#
When gimplification encounters a subexpression that is too
complex, it creates a new temporary variable to hold the value of
the subexpression, and adds a new statement to initialize it
before the current statement. These special temporaries are known
as expression temporaries, and are allocated using
get_formal_tmp_var. The compiler tries to always evaluate
identical expressions into the same temporary, to simplify
elimination of redundant calculations.
We can only use expression temporaries when we know that it will not be reevaluated before its value is used, and that it will not be otherwise modified [1].
. Other temporaries can be allocated
using get_initialized_tmp_var or create_tmp_var.
Currently, an expression like a = b + 5 is not reduced any
further. We tried converting it to something like
T1 = b + 5;
a = T1;
but this bloated the representation for minimal benefit. However, a variable which must live in memory cannot appear in an expression; its value is explicitly loaded into a temporary first. Similarly, storing the value of an expression to a memory variable goes through a temporary.