cmd/compile: optimize conditional pointer assignment

[marigonzes]

What version of Go are you using (go version)?

$ go version
go version devel +d15dfdc Sun Sep 1 02:31:50 2019 +0000 linux/amd64

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

Yes.

What did you do?

I compiled the following function (https://godbolt.org/z/rRkMVJ):

func fn(cond bool) int {
	a := new(int)
	if cond {
		*a = 1
	} else {
		*a = 2
	}
    return *a
}

What did you expect to see?

I expected that the generated instructions would be similar to https://godbolt.org/z/q0k3NT

What did you see instead?

Instead, there are MOV instructions to temporary stack variables and there is no use of the CMOV instruction.

[ALTree]

Why would you write code like that? I mean, yeah, it could be compiled more efficiently... but optimizations generally 1) increase the complexity of the compiler's code 2) have the potential to slow down the compiler; so in general it's only worth to optimize reasonable code patterns that could appear in real-world code. Is this the case?

[marigonzes]

You are probably right, but I found this while looking at an example published in Slack (https://godbolt.org/z/kofqr2). After playing around with the code, I ended up with the above function and opened this issue.
Please close it if you don't think this kind of code appears in production 😉