[GitHub] [incubator-tvm] gussmith23 opened a new issue #4449: [RFC] Program Analysis Framework in Relay

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gussmith23 opened a new issue #4449: [RFC] Program Analysis Framework in Relay
URL: https://github.com/apache/incubator-tvm/issues/4449
 
 
   Please also see #3895, which is @MarisaKirisame's RFC around a specific change to support analyses in Relay.
   
   This RFC pertains to building a centralized, comprehensive program analysis framework in Relay. I see two primary uses of program analyses in Relay: for generating analysis data **used by the compiler**, to do things such as quantization, and for generating human-readable data **used by developers**, useful for exploring Relay programs. Whereas Marisa's request pertains more to the first use-case, this request is inspired by the second use-case, and motivated by a desire to build a framework that covers both use-cases. Such frameworks exist -- see [LLVM's framework](http://llvm.org/docs/WritingAnLLVMPass.html), which is designed to generate data useful to both the compiler and the developer.
   
   I built [a small analysis framework](https://github.com/microsoft/Analysis-Framework-for-TVM) for Relay this past summer at Microsoft, useful for building human-readable analyses of Relay programs. A demo of this framework can be found [here](https://github.com/gussmith23/tvm/blob/c28b928b33da0cad03fc6804f26e34d61aca1606/demo.ipynb), on my branch of TVM.
   
   These are features I developed in my simple framework:
   - Utilities for exporting analysis results into some more useful format (e.g. pandas)
     + I achieve this in my simple framework by giving utilities which: (1) extract "columns" out of the resulting analysis data and (2) convert analysis data into a record-based format which can be imported into pandas.
   - A consistent format for the resulting analysis data, allowing for analyses to be composed and to depend on the outputs of previous analyses.
     + In my framework, analysis data is simply structured into a dictionary-of-dictionaries in Python, where keys are strings representing column/column-group names.
   - A helper class for doing simple static dataflow analysis, built on Relay's `ExprVisitor`.
   
   These are features which could be considered for a full framework:
   - The ability to do dynamic analysis of programs
     + There is some exploration of this in the demo linked above
   - Integration with the Pass Manager, so that dependencies between passes can be explicit
   - Utilities for doing control-flow analyses
   
   These are open questions that I have:
   - What examples of "ad-hoc" program analyses exist in Relay? #3895 lists some.
   - What features are needed by compiler analyses?
   
   I'm posting this in advance of the TVM conference this year, as I'm doing a lighting talk on program analysis in Relay and am hoping that the talk generates some discussion.

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