[LLVMdev] MachineInstr: external symbols problem

[Chris Lattner]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Hello,
> I just wrote the code like this:
>
> BuildMI(BB, NM::CALL, 1)
>                    .addExternalSymbol(("_lvksda_control_marker_"
>                                       + lexical_cast<string>(bb)).c_str());
>
> and got some unexpected string in the assembler output. The problem is 
> that when external symbol is added to MachineInstruction, MachineOperand 
> is created with the char* argument, but the argument is not copied, it's 
> just stored in MachineOperand::symbolName. So, all long as string 
> temporary is destroyed, that pointer points to garbage. I suppose I 
> could handle this by adding function to LLVM module and using 
> .addGlobalValue, but still, is the non-copying behaviour of constructor 
> by design?

Yes, this is by design.  MachineOperand is supposed to be a very 
light-weight union.  We actually used to have it carry an std::string 
around, but this required conditional code to make sure to free it and 
copy it when neccesary.

If you'd like to do this, there are a couple of options: first, you could 
build the table in the asmprinter, and have the operands point into the 
string table.  Second, you could add the functions to the Module, though 
that is less appealing (ideally the code generator would not hack on the 
LLVM module at all... we're not there yet, but slowly getting there).

Another thing that might be interesting is the new llvm.pcmarker intrinsic 
that Andrew recently added.  I have no idea if it would be useful to you 
or not, but... it's documented here:
http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/docs/LangRef.html#i_pcmarker

-Chris

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