The Optimiser（优化器）

This section discusses the optimiser that was first added to Solidity, which operates on opcode streams. For information on the new Yul-based optimiser, please see the readme on github.

The Solidity optimiser operates on assembly. It splits the sequence of instructions into basic blocks at JUMPs and JUMPDESTs. Inside these blocks, the optimiser analyses the instructions and records every modification to the stack, memory, or storage as an expression which consists of an instruction and a list of arguments which are pointers to other expressions. The optimiser uses a component called “CommonSubexpressionEliminator” that amongst other tasks, finds expressions that are always equal (on every input) and combines them into an expression class. The optimiser first tries to find each new expression in a list of already known expressions. If this does not work, it simplifies the expression according to rules like constant + constant = sum_of_constants or X * 1 = X. Since this is a recursive process, we can also apply the latter rule if the second factor is a more complex expression where we know that it always evaluates to one. Modifications to storage and memory locations have to erase knowledge about storage and memory locations which are not known to be different. If we first write to location x and then to location y and both are input variables, the second could overwrite the first, so we do not know what is stored at x after we wrote to y. If simplification of the expression x - y evaluates to a non-zero constant, we know that we can keep our knowledge about what is stored at x.

After this process, we know which expressions have to be on the stack at the end, and have a list of modifications to memory and storage. This information is stored together with the basic blocks and is used to link them. Furthermore, knowledge about the stack, storage and memory configuration is forwarded to the next block(s). If we know the targets of all JUMP and JUMPI instructions, we can build a complete control flow graph of the program. If there is only one target we do not know (this can happen as in principle, jump targets can be computed from inputs), we have to erase all knowledge about the input state of a block as it can be the target of the unknown JUMP. If the optimiser finds a JUMPI whose condition evaluates to a constant, it transforms it to an unconditional jump.

As the last step, the code in each block is re-generated. The optimiser creates a dependency graph from the expressions on the stack at the end of the block, and it drops every operation that is not part of this graph. It generates code that applies the modifications to memory and storage in the order they were made in the original code (dropping modifications which were found not to be needed). Finally, it generates all values that are required to be on the stack in the correct place.

These steps are applied to each basic block and the newly generated code is used as replacement if it is smaller. If a basic block is split at a JUMPI and during the analysis, the condition evaluates to a constant, the JUMPI is replaced depending on the value of the constant. Thus code like

uint x = 7;
data[7] = 9;
if (data[x] != x + 2)
  return 2;
else
  return 1;

still simplifies to code which you can compile even though the instructions contained a jump in the beginning of the process:

data[7] = 9;
return 1;