Reply To: Loop compilation

rd can’t copy belt values; the whole point of that phase is that it has no belt inputs. It has four purposes:

1. Dropping predefined “popular constants” (popCons) like [0, 1, 2, 3], π, e, √2. “The selection of popCons varies by member, but all include 0, 1, -1, and None of all widths.” con should work as well, but is significantly larger.

2. Operating on the in-core scratchpad, allocated with scratchf. spill and fill are for the extended scratchpad, which is stored in memory and allocated with exscratchf, and can be much larger.

3. Reading registers. These aren’t belt locations, they are things like hardware counters, threadIDs, and supposedly also “thisPointer” for method calls.

4. Stream handling, a magic secret thing for “cacheless bulk memory access” we’ve never heard the details of, as far as I know.