These were legacy concepts that are now superceded by direct Torch to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.
This vastly simplifies our code, allowing deleting multiple ops,
simplifying multiple passes, and removing a whole pass.
Now `refback` dialect is down to one op (refback.alloc_memref, which
simplifies allocations to just take a shape instead of individual
extents).
The time has come for BypassShapes/LowerShapedResultsToMemref to go away :(
For the reference backend, being consistent with upstream conventions is
the name of the game now.
This is a step down in a number of ways, e.g. test clarity and
separation of concerns. But it is fewer files and fewer tests, and
*does* address the "TODO: This is really fragile". It also eliminates two
more ops from the refback dialect (sadly, they are the
shaped_results/yield that we were getting kind of fond of, but alas).
Now the reference backend is cleanly accepts "TCP"+scalar ops.
We introduce tcf-refback-lowering-pipeline which also does TCF->TCP
conversion for convenience until we have a "target interface".
Sean Silva