[LLVMdev] Proposal: New IR instruction for casting between address spaces

[Mon Ping Wang]

On Sep 13, 2012, at 2:23 PM, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:

> On Sep 13, 2012, at 12:00 PM, Mon Ping Wang <monping at apple.com> wrote:
>>>> In C, integer to point conversions are implementation defined and
>>>> depends on what the addressing structure of the execution environment
>>>> is. Given the current definition of ptrtoint and intoptr, I feel that
>>>> the addressing structure feels like a flat memory model starting from 0
>>>> and the value "b" should be 65529.  In your example where we know the
>>>> largest pointer is 64b, I would expect the final result to be the same
>>>> as doing a ptrtoint from int(1) to i64 and intotptr to int(2)*.
>>> [Villmow, Micah] So then if there is already a way to do this, what really is the benefit of adding a new instruction? 
>>> Also there is a typo in my example, the second assignment should not have the '*'. I can add a new instruction if that
>>> is the recommended behavior, but I think it would also be fine to force ptrtoint and inttoptr, although it does take one instruction more.
>>> 
>> 
>> The problem with using ptrtoint and inttoptr is that one has to pick an intermediate integer type that is safe to convert to and from.  Since the pointer size is target dependent, it seems unnatural to use ptrtoint and inttoptr for that.  
> 
> If we were to add first class support for this, we'd have to add three new instructions: trunc_ptr, sext_ptr, and zext_ptr, all of which would be used for pointer to pointer conversions.
> 
> Why is it so bad to use ptrtoint/inttoptr with some large-enough integer size?  Neither solution avoids exposing target information into IR.
> 

The pointer size is target dependent so it seems strange to choose an arbitrary size to convert to and from. Are you making a practical argument that 64b is sufficient on all machines so all targets can use that?  In other words, pointers > 64 doesn't make any sense in terms of the address space? (A pointer to be > 64 if clients want to use some upper bits to track some state I guess). 

In terms of the three new instructions, one could argue that ptrtoint and intoptr has the same issue or those can also explode in a similar way.  To use them, this seems target dependent so unless we really want to support all the various addressing structures, I rather not have them.

  -- Mon Ping