commit 61ba1481e200b5b35baa81ffcff81acb678e8508
author Erich Keane <erich.keane@intel.com> Tue Dec 24 07:28:40 2019 -0800
committer Erich Keane <erich.keane@intel.com> Fri Apr 17 07:10:57 2020 -0700
tree bdeee6c11adcce4c9f03cebd224ec676a7b62d97
parent e1c67273d53eaf0fe29b6c6fc69f31ff05dbde34

Implement _ExtInt as an extended int type specifier.

Introduction/Motivation:
LLVM-IR supports integers of non-power-of-2 bitwidth, in the iN syntax.
Integers of non-power-of-two aren't particularly interesting or useful
on most hardware, so much so that no language in Clang has been
motivated to expose it before.

However, in the case of FPGA hardware normal integer types where the
full bitwidth isn't used, is extremely wasteful and has severe
performance/space concerns.  Because of this, Intel has introduced this
functionality in the High Level Synthesis compiler[0]
under the name "Arbitrary Precision Integer" (ap_int for short). This
has been extremely useful and effective for our users, permitting them
to optimize their storage and operation space on an architecture where
both can be extremely expensive.

We are proposing upstreaming a more palatable version of this to the
community, in the form of this proposal and accompanying patch.  We are
proposing the syntax _ExtInt(N).  We intend to propose this to the WG14
committee[1], and the underscore-capital seems like the active direction
for a WG14 paper's acceptance.  An alternative that Richard Smith
suggested on the initial review was __int(N), however we believe that
is much less acceptable by WG14.  We considered _Int, however _Int is
used as an identifier in libstdc++ and there is no good way to fall
back to an identifier (since _Int(5) is indistinguishable from an
unnamed initializer of a template type named _Int).

[0]https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/software/programmable/quartus-prime/hls-compiler.html)
[1]http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2472.pdf

Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D73967