9. Hacking on the Futhark Compiler

The Futhark compiler is a significant body of code with a not entirely straightforward design. The main source of documentation is the Haddock comments in the source code itself. You can generate hyperlinked reference documentation by running stack haddock or cabal haddock, depending on your preference of build system. There is also possibly-outdated documentation on Hackage

If you feel that the documentation is incomplete, or something lacks an explanation, then feel free to report it as an issue on the GitHub page. Documentation bugs are bugs too.

The Futhark compiler is usually built using Stack. It’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with how it works. As a starting point, here are a few hints:

  • When testing, pass --fast to stack to disable the GHC optimiser. This speeds up builds considerably (although it still takes a while). The resulting Futhark compiler will run slower, but it is not something you will notice for small test programs.

  • When debugging, pass --profile to stack. This will build the Futhark compiler with debugging information (not just profiling). In particular, hard crashes will print a stack trace. You can also get actual profiling information by passing +RTS -pprof-all -RTS to the Futhark compiler. This asks the Haskell runtime to print profiling information to a file. For more information, see the Profiling chapter in the GHC User Guide.

  • You may wish to set the environment variable FUTHARK_COMPILER_DEBUGGING=1. Currently this only has the effect of making the frontend print internal names, but it may control more things in the future.

9.1. Debugging Internal Type Errors

The Futhark compiler uses a typed core language, and the type checker is run after every pass. If a given pass produces a program with inconsistent typing, the compiler will report an error and abort. While not every compiler bug will manifest itself as a core language type error (unfortunately), many will. To write the erroneous core program to a file in case of type error, pass -v filename to the compiler. This will also enable verbose output, so you can tell which pass fails. The -v option is also useful when the compiler itself crashes, as you can at least tell where in the pipeline it got to.

9.2. Checking Generated Code

Hacking on the compiler will often involve inspecting the quality of the generated code. The recommended way to do this is to use futhark-c or futhark-opencl to compile a Futhark program to an executable. These backends insert various forms of instrumentation that can be enabled by passing run-time options to the generated executable.

  • As a first resort, use -t option to use the built-in runtime measurements. A nice trick is to pass -t /dev/stderr, while redirecting standard output to /dev/null. This will print the runtime on the screen, but not the execution result.

  • Optionally use -r to ask for several runs, e.g. -r 10. If combined with -t, this will cause several runtimes to be printed (one per line). The futhark-bench tool itself uses -t and -r to perform its measurements.

  • Pass -D to have the program print information on allocation and deallocation of memory.

  • (futhark-opencl only) Use the -D option to enable synchronous execution. clFinish() will be called after most OpenCL operations, and a running log of kernel invocations will be printed. At the end of execution, the program prints a table summarising all kernels and their total runtime and average runtime.

9.3. Using futhark dev

For debugging specific compiler passes, the futhark dev subcommand allows you to tailor your own compilation pipeline using command line options. It is also useful for seeing what the AST looks like after specific passes.

9.4. When you are about to have a bad day

When using the cuda backend, you can use the --dump-ptx runtime option to dump PTX, a kind of high-level assembly for NVIDIA GPUs, corresponding to the GPU kernels. This can be used to investigate why the generated code isn’t running as fast as you expect (not fun), or even whether NVIDIAs compiler is miscompiling something (extremely not fun). With the OpenCL backend, --dump-opencl-binary does the same thing.

On AMD platforms, --dump-opencl-binary tends to produce an actual binary of some kind, and it is pretty tricky to obtain a debugger for it (they are available and open source, but the documentation and installation instructions are terrible). Instead, AMDs OpenCL kernel compiler accepts a -save-temps=foo build option, which will make it write certain intermediate files, prefixed with foo. In particular, it will write an .s file that contains what appears to be HSA assembly (at least when using ROCm). If you find yourself having to do do this, then you are definitely going to have a bad day, and probably evening and night as well.