[LLVMdev] Reference Manual Clarifications 2

[Jon Sargeant]

Chris Lattner wrote:
> On Apr 19, 2008, at 3:27 PM, Jon Sargeant wrote:
>>>> Regarding malloc and alloca, I realized that the size is unsigned,
>>>> so a
>>>> negative value for NumElements is impossible.  I suggest replacing  
>>>> "it
>>>> is the number of elements allocated" with "it is the UNSIGNED number
>>>> of
>>>> elements allocated".
>>> I'm not sure why this is more clear.
>> The semantics of malloc and alloca depend on whether you interpret
>> NumElements as a signed or unsigned 32-bit integer.  For example, if
>> NumElements is 0xffffFFFF, should the instruction fail (because
>> allocating a negative number of elements doesn't make sense), or  
>> should
>> the instruction allocate 2^32-1 elements?  I don't see any mention of
>> whether NumElements is signed or unsigned in the documentation.
> 
> How could an element count be treated as negative?  It doesn't make  
> sense to allocate negative elements.

True, but making NumElements unsigned just because it can never have a 
negative value is not obvious.  I always use signed integers for 
nonnegative counts for a couple of reasons.  First, I can assign -1 to 
the count to indicate an invalid or unknown value.  Second, if I attempt 
to allocate a negative count, I can print an assertion failure and abort 
the program.  Had I interpreted the count as an unsigned value, the 
program would attempt to allocate anywhere from 2 gigabytes to 4 
gigabytes.  I'm not necessarily saying that NumElements should be 
signed, only that the choice between signed and unsigned is not obvious.

Best Regards,
Jon