[llvm-commits] RFC: initial union syntax support

[Nick Lewycky]

Frits van Bommel wrote:
> Nick Lewycky wrote:
>> I really don't like allowing a union to contain the same type twice. 
>> That should be illegal no matter what the object hierarchy is.
> 
> That would require the frontend to make sure different types being inserted into 
> the union don't happen to have the same LLVM type.

No it doesn't.

> For instance, 'int' and 'unsigned' are different in the frontend, but the same 
> in LLVM. This is a simple case, but the same goes for more complicated struct 
> types and such so in practice this would require some kind of hashset in the 
> frontend, just to construct a union of arbitrary types.
> 
> Is there any actual harm in allowing it?

If you want the frontend to send i32 and i32 into StructType::get, then 
it's StructType::get's job to unique them.

By the same token, we only permit one Int32Ty, but it's not up to the 
frontend to maintain that guarantee. For example, if you call 
IntegerType::get(32 bits) the implementation of IntegerType::get is 
responsible for guaranteeing that only one 32-bit IntegerType exists.

In the case that StructType::get is constructing a union, it should put 
the types into a set to sort and unique them. However, we're not really 
allowed to do pointer comparisons in LLVM (because it means that you'll 
encounter non-determininstic bugs) so it will also need to have some 
ordering function that doesn't rely on the pointers.

Nick