[cfe-dev] [3.8 Release] Please write release notes!

[John McCall via cfe-dev]

> On Feb 26, 2016, at 9:16 AM, Hans Wennborg via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> If you were thinking about writing a note for 3.8 but didn't get
> around to it yet, this is the final reminder.
> 
> (In particular, the notes for X86 and PowerPC could use some attention.)

You asked for a release note about alignment; here you go.

 --

Alignment

Clang has gotten better at passing down strict type alignment information to LLVM,
and several targets have gotten better at taking advantage of that information.

Dereferencing a pointer that is not adequately aligned for its type is undefined
behavior.  It may crash on target architectures that strictly enforce alignment, but
even on architectures that do not, frequent use of unaligned pointers may hurt
the performance of the generated code.

If you find yourself fixing a bug involving an inadequately aligned pointer, you
have several options.

The best option, when practical, is to increase the alignment of the memory.
For example, this array is not guaranteed to be sufficiently aligned to store
a pointer value:

  char buffer[sizeof(const char*)];

Writing a pointer directly into it violates C's alignment rules:

  ((const char**) buffer)[0] = “Hello, world!\n”;

But you can use alignment attributes to increase the required alignment:

  __attribute__((aligned(__alignof__(const char*))))
  char buffer[sizeof(const char*)];

When that’s not practical, you can instead reduce the alignment requirements
of the pointer.  If the pointer is to a struct that represents that layout of a
serialized structure, consider making that struct packed; this will remove any
implicit internal padding that the compiler might add to the struct and
reduce its alignment requirement to 1.

  struct file_header {
    uint16_t magic_number;
    uint16_t format_version;
    uint16_t num_entries;
  } __attribute__((packed));

You may also override the default alignment assumptions of a pointer by
using a typedef with explicit alignment:

  typedef const char *unaligned_char_ptr __attribute__((aligned(1)));
  ((unaligned_char_ptr*) buffer)[0] = “Hello, world!\n”;

The final option is to copy the memory into something that is properly
aligned.  Be aware, however, that Clang will assume that pointers are
properly aligned for their type when you pass them to a library function
like memcpy.  For example, this code will assume that the source and
destination pointers are both properly aligned for an int:

  void copy_int_array(int *dest, const int *src, size_t num) {
    memcpy(dest, src, num * sizeof(int));
  }

You may explicitly disable this assumption by casting the argument to a
less-aligned pointer type:

  void copy_unaligned_int_array(int *dest, const int *src, size_t num) {
    memcpy((char*) dest, (const char*) src, num * sizeof(int));
  }

Clang promises not to look through the explicit cast when inferring the
alignment of this memcpy.

 --

John.