Hey there 🤗, Welcome to my GSoC Journey

This is a series of blogs that I am writing to share my amazing GSoC 22 (Google Summer of Code 2022) Journey with you all.

Supporting Loops and Other Improvements

In this week, I added support for

  • loops, cycle and exit.
  • basic support for abs(), mod()
  • other minor improvements

There was a minor challenge faced this week in supporting of the abs/mod. The abs and mod functions are one of the first runtime functions to be supported by the wasm backend. For supporting mod/abs, we need to use the mod/abs function from the pure runtime library.

When using the mod/abs function, it seems that the ASR includes every function from the parent module of mod/abs. Since, the ASR seemed to include all the functions in the parent module of mod/abs, all of those were being needed to be defined by the WebAssembly Backend during the ASR->WASM conversion. I noticed that the llvm and cpp backends were defining only those functions from the parent of mod/abs, which were actually being needed/used by mod/abs. I wished to achieve/have a similar effect in the WASM Backend, that is, during the ASR->WASM conversion, the WebAssembly Backend should only define the function mod/abs and any other necessary helper functions being used by mod/abs. After playing with the code for some time (with no success), I later realized that, there might be an ASR->ASR pass which removes the unused functions. On inspecting the cpp backend, I found a pass named pass_unused_functions() which seemed to remove the unused/extra functions being included in the ASR. Using the pass_unused_functions(), the minor challenge was solved.

This phase was mostly/approximately from 09-07-2022 to 15-07-2022.

The MRs during this phase are as follows:

That’s all for this blog. Thank you for your time. We continue this series in the next blog.