[LLVMdev] simulating c style unions in LLVM

[me22]

2009/6/29 Carter Cheng <carter_cheng at yahoo.com>:
>
> I am trying to create a boxed tagged datatype for a language where it is necessary to resolve the type at runtime. If I were writing an interpreter in C- it would most likely look something like this-
>
> Is there a standard way for constructing a type like this in LLVM?
>

Well, you can always ask bitter melon, who translates this:

struct foo
{
   unsigned tag;
   union { long Int; double Float; } data;
};

void bar(struct foo *x) {
    x->data.Int = x->tag;
}

into this:

	%struct.anon = type { double }
	%struct.foo = type { i32, %struct.anon }

define void @bar(%struct.foo* nocapture %x) nounwind {
entry:
	%0 = getelementptr %struct.foo* %x, i32 0, i32 0		; <i32*> [#uses=1]
	%1 = load i32* %0, align 4		; <i32> [#uses=1]
	%2 = getelementptr %struct.foo* %x, i32 0, i32 1		; <%struct.anon*> [#uses=1]
	%3 = bitcast %struct.anon* %2 to i32*		; <i32*> [#uses=1]
	store i32 %1, i32* %3, align 4
	ret void
}

So essentially the union just turns into bitcasts.

I know there was some discussion about adding a first-order union to
LLVM a bit back, but IIRC disagreement over semantics prevented it
from going anywhere.