[pre-RFC] Name mangling in IRModules

[Mousius]

@areusch

Is the idea here to use pointer equality to determine when two Var with the same name reference the same logical thing? not sure how we differentiate between uses across the IRModule otherwise.

I think that’s the only way this could work unless I’m missing something? Even within an IRModule you’d need to do pointer comparison so you can have Var('constant') and Var('constant') resolve to constant_0 and constant_1.

@mbs-octoml

I think there’s two things to check: i) please take a look at the hackery in te_compiler which tries to resestablish unique GlobalVars despite names being generated via strings. Any change we make in this space should repair that mess.

One of the goals should be to strip te_compiler of all of this logic in favour of something smarter dealing with it, I think there’s more than just te_compiler that tries to figure out GlobalVar from String and pointer value at the same time and it really shouldn’t exist in any of these places imho? Does that agree with your view @mbs-octoml ?

@mbs-octoml

ii) We have both strings and GlobalVar forms of names kicking about in attributes as well in Exprs. So any mangling would need to account for those.

Are these at all consistent in the attrs? It’d be good to see examples but I get the impression it may just be a free-for-all? Unsure quite how to deal with it if people hide all the values in different attrs for the standalone Pass, unless we can have a more stable representation in the IR?