[LLVMdev] Ideas for annotating types?

[Talin]

I'd like to figure out a clean way to annotate LLVM types with additional
information. This is related to the garbage collection discussion - I'd like
to figure out a good way to do this, so I can add it to the proposal.

Basically what I want is to be able to take a Constant and associate it with
a type, such that (1) any backend pass that has a reference to the type can
quickly and efficiently get a reference to the associated Constant, and (2)
this information can be serialized into a bitcode file along with the rest
of the module contents. (By "quickly and efficiently" I mean that a backend
pass should be able to do a test on every value in a given module and check
to see if there associated data with that value's type, and not
significantly affect compilation time.)

For garbage collection, I'd use this feature to annotate each type with it's
trace table - basically it's the same information that I pass to
llvm.gcroot() today, but associated with a type rather than with a value.

However, I would imagine other uses for this facility. What this effectively
is "metadata for types", although unlike metadata nodes this data would be
immutable.

Also, it's OK if the solution requires changes to LLVM, as long as it
doesn't significantly impact performance for people who aren't using this
feature.
-- 
-- Talin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20110710/0f60eba5/attachment.html>