[lldb-dev] std::shared_ptr, RTTI, and LLDB

[Eli Friedman]

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Eli Friedman <eli.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Greg Clayton <gclayton at apple.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Jun 9, 2010, at 4:19 PM, Eli Friedman wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Greg Clayton <gclayton at apple.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Jun 9, 2010, at 3:44 PM, Eli Friedman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Currently, LLDB uses std::shared_ptr.  With gcc (or at least gcc 4.4),
>>>>> that means RTTI must be enabled.  However, LLVM and clang build with
>>>>> RTTI disabled (at least by default), so an RTTI-enabled LLDB won't
>>>>> link.  So I have two questions:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1. How difficult would it be to stop using shared_ptr?
>>>>
>>>> We use a lot of shared pointers, though we aren't currently using the fancy RTTI aspects of it. We really want _some_ sort of shared pointer so we can have STL collections of objects that don't move around when collections grow. Also with a lot of our partial parsing we can determine how many objects there are in a collection, resize the collection to contain that many objects, then lazily populate such objects.
>>>
>>> Okay... so it might potentially be possible to switch to something
>>> simpler, more like boost::intrusive_ptr?  I won't bother if there's a
>>> simpler solution, though; see below.
>>
>> As long as it is a reference counted pointer that doesn't require us to build boost.
>>
>> We can easily replace all shared pointers within LLDB by redefining "lldb::SharedPtr" in lldb-types.h.
>>
>> Feel free to experiment, though I would rather not pull in all of boost just to get a shared pointer... We currently get that from a tr1 directory on MacOSX. Does linux have a similar implementation in tr1 (#include <tr1/memory>)? We do make use of putting objects into shared pointers that are the virtual base class impementations of pure virtual protocols, so I am not sure if this requires RTTI (I can't remember what role RTTI plays in the shared pointers...).
>
> AFAIK, the shared_ptr RTTI is only necessary for get_deleter.  And
> actually, I think it's possible to use it without RTTI with the
> libstdc++ in gcc 4.5.
>
> I didn't remember originally, but actually we don't have to pull in
> anything; llvm::IntrusiveRefCntPtr is roughly equivalent.

Hmm, I didn't realize the shared_ptrs were being so heavily used; it's
way too much work to convert to an intrusive refcounting pointer.

>>>>> 2. Does the LLVM build in llvm.zip have RTTI enabled?
>>>>
>>>> No.
>>>>
>>>>> If so, how do you build LLVM that way?
>>>>
>>>> We don't. There are a few Clang/LLVM files that have RTTI manually disabled (add "-fno-rtti" to the compiler flags for these files) on them:
>>>>
>>>> ClangASTContext.cpp
>>>> RecordingMemoryManager.cpp
>>>> ClangASTSource.cpp
>>>
>>> Ah, I see.  There's a bit of an issue here, then: LLVM's make system
>>> only supports enabling/disabling RTTI on a per-directory basis.  Would
>>> you mind moving those files into subdirectories?
>>
>> We can do that.
>
> Let me try out converting everything to IntrusiveRefCntPtr; we can go
> with this if that doesn't work out.

So, please move the files into subdirectories.

-Eli