This CL starts by replacing AffineExpr* with value-type AffineExprRef in a few
places in the IR. By a domino effect that is pretty telling of the
inconsistencies in the codebase, const is removed where it makes sense.
The rationale is that the decision was concisously made that unique'd types
have pointer semantics without const specifier. This is fine but we should be
consistent. In the end, the only logical invariant is that there should never
be such a thing as a const AffineExpr*, const AffineMap* or const IntegerSet*
in our codebase.
This CL takes a number of shortcuts to killing const with fire, in particular
forcing const AffineExprRef to return the underlying non-const
AffineExpr*. This will be removed once AffineExpr* has disappeared in
containers but for now such shortcuts allow a bit of sanity in this long quest
for cleanups.
The **only** places where const AffineExpr*, const AffineMap* or const
IntegerSet* may still appear is by transitive needs from containers,
comparison operators etc.
There is still one major thing remaining here: figure out why cast/dyn_cast
return me a const AffineXXX*, which in turn requires a bunch of ugly
const_casts. I suspect this is due to the classof
taking const AffineXXXExpr*. I wonder whether this is a side effect of 1., if
it is coming from llvm itself (I'd doubt it) or something else (clattner@?)
In light of this, the whole discussion about const makes total sense to me now
and I would systematically apply the rule that in the end, we should never
have any const XXX in our codebase for unique'd types (assuming we can remove
them all in containers and no additional constness constraint is added on us
from the outside world).
PiperOrigin-RevId: 215811554
b55b407601