[llvm-commits] RFC: initial union syntax support

Andrew Lenharth andrewl at lenharth.org
Thu May 14 04:58:12 PDT 2009


On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 4:04 AM, Frits van Bommel <fvbommel at wxs.nl> wrote:
> Nick Lewycky wrote:
>> 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.
>
> So how will you then extract a pointer to one of the members? What GEP indices
> can you use if the order of members is not preserved? I really don't see how
> this can be done if union {i8, i32} == union {i32, i8}.
> Or do you want to disallow GEPping into unions, forcing the use of bitcasts?

I agree.  Reordering the elements on creation would make this a pain
to deal with.  Since it is a struct, GEPs are sane (constant index) so
it would be a simple matter for a pass to prune redundant fields and
rewrite GEPs.  But that should happen after the front end is done.
The alternative is the create a whole bunch of new machinery so you
can ask for the index of the field holding type T.

The whole point of this exercise is to remove bitcasts.  In fact,
though I am not suggesting it, you could do away with bitcasts
completely given unions.

Andrew



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