[LLVMdev] Finding Targets of a Function Pointer

[Luke Dalessandro]

Patrick Alexander Simmons wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was wondering whether there's any existing code to find all possible 
> targets of a function pointer in LLVM, and, if not, if there were a 
> smarter way to go about writing something to accomplish this than the 
> obvious way of recursively following the def-use chains and creating an 
> aggregate set.

I think the only way to do this is to use an alias analysis to create 
points-to sets. You can then run the analysis and ask it for may-alias 
results between function pointers at call sites, and the set of 
functions that you have available. Clearly you can have trouble if there 
are functions that aren't currently available.

You should probably look at the DSA stuff in poolalloc as I think that 
it does some of this, or at least contains infrastructure to do some of 
this.

One of the main reasons to want to do this is for member function call 
devirtualization. Unfortunately, the code generated by llvm-g++ isn't 
great for this task, since it erases all of the types in a vtable. If 
this is what you are doing then you are likely to run into trouble in 
moderate sized programs.

Luke

> 
> --Patrick
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