[Unix-jun72] status on disassembler

[Tim Newsham]

> Thanks for the thought, but I don't think it is, quite, in part because
> of the presence of backward branches:
>
> 2:
> 	br	1f
> 	br	2b
> 1:
>
> Here the 2 could be a 1, despite overlapping ranges:
>
> 1:
> 	br	1f
> 	br	1b
> 1:

I think you can consider "1f" and "1b" to be two separate names for
the sake of the register coloring algorithm (both of which happen
to exist at the point where the "1:" label is defined).  In many
cases only the forward one will be live, in other cases only the
backward one will be live, but sometimes both will be live simultaneously.
This does add a slight difference to the graph because "1f" and "1b"
must be given the same number "1" when both are alive at the same
definition site.

> To further complicate things, it would be especially nice to allocate
> labels not just in a legal way (that preserves the semantics of the
> program), but actually in a way as similar as possible to the way that
> humans were doing so, for the sake of improved reconstruction. (A
> complication with *that* is that, in some cases, the labels are
> obviously subtopimal, presumably due to the historical sequence of edits.)

I think doing a minimum coloring will be pretty close to what a human
would do.  If you want to, you can try to swap around labels so that
the outter most labels have low numbers and the inner labels (nested
inside loops) have the higher numbers...

Tim Newsham
http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/