coverage: Only merge adjacent coverage spans
For a long time, coverage instrumentation has automatically “merged” spans with the same control-flow into a smaller number of larger spans, even when the spans being merged are not overlapping or adjacent. This causes any source text between the original spans to be included in the merged span, which is then associated with an execution count when shown in coverage reports.
That approach causes a number of problems:
- The intervening source text can contain all sorts of things that shouldn't really be marked as executable code (e.g. nested items, parts of macro invocations, long comments). In some cases we have complicated workarounds (e.g. bucketing to avoid merging spans across nested items), but in other cases there isn't much we can do.
- Merging can have aesthetically weird effects, such as including unbalanced parentheses, because the merging process doesn't really understand what it's doing at a source code level.
- It generally leads to an accumulation of piled-on heuristics and special cases that give decent-looking results, but are fiendishly difficult to modify or replace.
Therefore, this PR aims to abolish the merging of non-adjacent coverage spans.
The big tradeoff here is that the resulting coverage metadata (embedded in the instrumented binary) tends to become larger, because the overall number of distinct spans has increased. That's unfortunate, but I see it as the inevitable cost of cleaning up the messes and inaccuracies that were caused by the old approach. And the resulting spans do tend to be more accurate to the program's actual control-flow.
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The `.coverage` snapshot changes give an indication of how this PR will affect user-visible coverage reports. In many cases the changes to reporting are minor or even nonexistent, despite substantial changes to the metadata (as indicated by `.cov-map` snapshots).
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try-job: aarch64-gnu
3b82d4640a