[LLVMdev] Re: New primitive type for 32/64 compatibility?

[Mike Hearn]

On Sat, 16 Apr 2005 10:38:10 -0500, Chris Lattner wrote:
> While I don't think that having 'long_t' or something like that is 
> necessarily a good idea, I do think that having an 'intptr' type could be 
> a useful feature, with the advantage of it being a language-independent 
> construct.  I think this would capture what you're really going for, and 
> have very simple and well-defined meaning.  

Yes, maybe ... what exactly is the definition of this type? On LP64
systems the width of ints and pointers are different.

>                                               If other front-end people
> think that this would be a useful abstraction for providing portable
> code, and can give examples where it would be used, that would provide a
> lot of credibility in my mind for the feature.

OK. I can't actually think of a use for it outside of C/C++ as I don't
think any other languages have types which are so loosely defined.

> The bigger problem I suspect is that you'll need to modify the LLVM C
> front-end, llvm-gcc, to produce these.  I suspect that making it produce
> these will be fairly hard, as GCC's internal representation is
> notoriously for being not type-consistent.  If you wanted to start on a
> project like this, that would be the place to get started.

Alright. I will keep this in mind. Thanks for getting me started.

thanks -mike