[PATCH] D41697: [DebugInfo][Metadata] Add support for a DIExpression as 'count' field of DISubrange.

[Sander de Smalen via Phabricator via llvm-commits]

sdesmalen added a comment.

Hi @aprantl, I understand the confusion now, sorry for not making this more clear earlier on! Let me clarify the use-cases by answering your questions.

> If you use DIExpressions for the pseudo-register, why do you still need to reference other metadata nodes in DISubranges, is that orthogonal?

That is indeed orthogonal. I basically see two separate reasons to extend DISubrange:

1. Make 'count' more flexible to allow specifying with a DIExpression.
2. Make 'count' more flexible to be able to reference another metadata node.

Reason 1 is to express the type of an SVE vector, we can generate (in Clang) a DISubrange that expresses the number of elements in the vector (i.e. 'count') as a function of Reg46, defined as the number of 64bit 'granules' in a scalable vector. So for a 128 bit vector reg46 will be '2', for a 256bit vector '4', and so on.
So, for a type '<n x 2 x i64>' (meaning "a scalable vector containing 'n x 2' i64 elements"), the resulting DWARF expression would be (DW_OP_reg46). For type '<n x 4 x i32>' the DWARF expression would be twice the amount of elements, so (DW_OP_reg46, DW_OP_constu, 2, DW_OP_mul).

Reason 2 is to express the type/size of a variable length array by referencing a size expression that may reside in memory or in a register.

As you pointed out, there is also a third case that ties together a Metadata reference and a DIExpression (e.g. DIExpression(!1, !2, DW_OP_plus)), which would be required for more complicated cases. I have not tried to address something like that in this patch-series since it is not required to implement the C99 VLA support, but we confirmed that there are cases where this is useful/required.

> Were you thinking of generating the DW_OP_breg46 right in the frontend? That would be certainly doable, but it is a departure from how we currently deal with DIExpressions, where DW_OP_reg operands are only generated in the backend.

Not sure if there is a better way, but we indeed have a downstream implementation to do this in Clang, since this is the place where the type Metadata for vectors/arrays is created.

> But will these expressions consist of a single DW_OP_reg46 or do you need to generate more complex expressions?

These expressions will be slightly more involved than just DW_OP_reg46, as shown above.


https://reviews.llvm.org/D41697