These were legacy concepts that are now superceded by direct Torch to
linalg-on-tensors lowering. These were based on some very early thinking
related to the layering of frontends vs codegen, which is now obsolete
because:
- We expected a lot more centralization at the frontend (TCF) level. It
turns out that frontend needs really vary a lot, and there is no grand
unifying TCF dialect plausible. The additional layer isn't worth it.
- Linalg-on-tensors obsoletes the primary need for TCP. There are still
a few things not representable with linalg-on-tensors, but the support
is growing and the whole "not included in linalg-on-tensors" direction
needs to be rethought. Our TCP dialect didn't cover any of the
actually important things in this space (such as sort, FFT, top-k,
etc.).
See historical [slides](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iljcpTQ5NPaMfGpoPDFml1XkYxjK_6A4/view) / [recording](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jSPa8TwPKUt0WuLquGc8OgSUVYJHMvWZ/view)
for more details on the origin story here.
Their presence was confusing users too
[bug](https://github.com/llvm/mlir-npcomp/issues/248).
Also,
- Trim down npcomp-run-mlir testing. It was testing TCF to TCP
lowering for the most part. The essential stuff is retained and
rephrased with linalg-on-tensors. (we should probably rename it
"refback-run" or something, as it is just a way to invoke RefBackend)
- test/Python/Backend/RefJIT/simple_invoke_numpy.py is XFAIL'ed. Our
"anti-framework" direction seems to be the likely future path.
* Change aligned_alloc -> malloc. It can fail (and does on MacOS) and is a bit over-aggressive optimization for a reference backend.
* Fixed a fragile test that prints -0.0 on MacOS.
* Fail the test (not the framework) on failure to trace (Torch on MacOS is missing features).
* Fix .so -> .dylib for compiler runtime.
* A bit gross because I took the chance to upgrade all of the backend bits to the new MLIR Python bindings and we still co-mingle the old and new for now.
* Since the Python created PassManagers are configured for explicit nesting, I had to upgrade some of the pass pipelines to be explicit.
* The demo in mul_maximum_e2e.py now compiles, runs through PyTorch and through the JIT, prints and asserts the same results.
* I am not claiming that this is the prettiest API in this patch: consider that this is just directly using low-level APIs and there should be an intervening high level API.
Sean Silva
Stella Laurenzo