[cfe-dev] Block introspection and GNU runtime new ABI support

[David Chisnall]

Hi Chris,

On 10 Sep 2009, at 20:54, Chris Lattner wrote:

> On Sep 9, 2009, at 6:39 PM, David Chisnall wrote:
>
>> The other patch adds a -fblock-introspection flag.  When this is  
>> specified, or when -fgnu-runtime is specified, an extra field is  
>> added to the block structure that contains an Objective-C type  
>> encoding of the block function.  I've also updated one of the block  
>> tests to ensure that this field is only being emitted when the flag  
>> is provided.
>
> Hi David,
>
> Adding introspection information for blocks is something we'll  
> probably want to do in the next abi as well, but we'll do it a  
> different way.  Are you sure you want to diverge on this?

It's a feature we want now, so if you'll let us know how you want to  
implement it then we can modify our runtime to simplify the compiler,  
but it is something that we want sooner rather than later (as I said  
when you originally announced blocks, ideally we'd also like full  
reflection in bound variables as we have with LanguageKit blocks, but  
that's probably more effort to implement than it's worth for the few  
cases where it's useful, and we're reasonably happy to just use  
Smalltalk for them).

We've only just released the updated runtime for testing, so nothing  
in the new ABI is set in stone yet - but we would like it to be  
relatively soon.

David