[cfe-dev] Objective-C tidy up

[Steve Naroff]

On Jun 3, 2008, at 10:23 AM, David Chisnall wrote:

> On 3 Jun 2008, at 17:49, Chris Lattner wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jun 3, 2008, at 4:39 AM, David Chisnall wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On 3 Jun 2008, at 07:33, Chris Lattner wrote:
>>>
>>>> Why should self and _cmd be ParmVarDecls?  Shouldn't they be
>>>> PredefinedExprs?
>>>
>>> That's what I did to start with, but PredefinedExprs need special
>>> handling in codegen, while ParmVarDecls are automatically turned
>>> into loads of %var.addr.  Since they are parameters, and since it
>>> simplifies the rest of the implementation, it seemed like a
>>> ParmVarDecl would be the right thing to choose.
>>
>> ParmVarDecl is an artifact of common implementations, not the way the
>> language works.  They are not parameters, as they obviously don't  
>> have
>> location info etc.
>
> They are artefacts of both all existing implementations (GNU, Apple,  
> and POC) and the language philosophy ('no magic'), and is something  
> relied on by a lot of existing code.  You can promote them to  
> explicit parameters by requesting a pointer to the function  
> implementing the method (something supported by both Brad Cox's  
> original design and implementation, and by OpenStep) and calling  
> this as a C function.

When Brad and I were developing ObjC @ PPI, we never considered having  
multiple ABI's and runtime's.

Today, it's clearer that the mechanism for calling a C function (that  
represents a method) is ABI dependent.

I don't see any reason why the front-end needs to commit to these  
details (especially for _cmd, which I regret, since it's so uncommon).

snaroff

> The fact that they have no source location is merely syntactic sugar  
> - they are real parameters and Objective-C programmers expect to be  
> able to treat them as such.  Treating them as something special  
> seems like an unnecessary layer of abstraction which reflects  
> neither how they are used nor how they are implemented.
>
> This is in contrast to super, which is an alias for self with  
> different semantics (i.e. sending a message to super sends a message  
> where the destination class is resolved at compile time, not at  
> runtime).
>
>>>> +++ include/clang/AST/DeclObjC.h	(working copy)
>>>> @@ -91,7 +91,8 @@
>>>> // The following are only used for method definitions, null
>>>> otherwise.
>>>> // FIXME: space savings opportunity, consider a sub-class.
>>>> Stmt *Body;
>>>> -  ParmVarDecl *SelfDecl;
>>>> +  // Decls for implicit parameters
>>>> +  llvm::SmallVector<ParmVarDecl *, 2> ImplicitParamInfo;
>>>>
>>>> If there are always exactly two of these, just use:
>>>>
>>>> ParmVarDecl *ImplicitParamInfo[2];
>>>
>>> There will be three for the Étoilé runtime.  Someone expressed
>>> interest in porting Objective-C to the COLA runtime from the
>>> Viewpoints Research Institute as well, and this would have somewhere
>>> between one and four depending on how they did it.
>>
>> Please use a fixed size array.  That is cheaper than a  
>> smallvector<4>.
>
> I've made this change, and included the updated diff.
>
> David
>
> <objc.diff>
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