[LLVMdev] lli in interpreter mode and external native libraries

[Chris Lattner]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Sarah Thompson wrote:
> Chris Lattner wrote:
>> 3. Best: Find a "foreign function interface" library, and use that to
>>     interface to native code.
>>
> This is the only option that's really usable, unfortunately, because I
> have no control over what code some potential user might want to model
> check.

Ok.

> I was wondering whether there might be anything in the JIT support that
> could be reused for this purpose?

The JIT has a superset of this functionality.  However, if there is JIT 
support for the host that you are interested in, you shouldn't have to use 
the interpreter at all.

> I can't really move to using the JIT entirely because I want to replace
> the memory model with something that supports backtracking -- this is
> doable (fairly) straightforwardly with the interpreter, but it would
> require some very complicated transformations to the code in order to do
> this within the JIT environment, and it would be quite tricky to avoid
> subtly breaking the semantics. That kind of approach is possible,
> probably, but not really something I want to attack right now.

Ok.  The easiest (in some senses) approach would be to do what you say 
above.  However, you could probably arrange for a mixed approach to work. 
in particular, you could have the JIT dynamically compile the FFI code you 
need by dynamically generating the "unpack from GenericValue" code for 
each callee you are interested in.

-Chris

-- 
http://nondot.org/sabre/
http://llvm.org/