[LLVMdev] Using LLVM for a dynamically typed language

[Evan Jones]

On Thu, 2005-21-04 at 09:31 -0400, Vyacheslav Akhmechet wrote:
> At this point I cannot know the type of 'i' at compile time. At
> runtime 'i' is a structure that contains a type and a function
> pointer. What I can't figure out is how to cast my llvm function 
> pointer to an appropriate function type. I cannot know until runtime
> what the type will be. Naturally I can add runtime code that will do
> all appropriate checks (number of parameters, etc.) but how do I do
> the actual cast?

I'm not sure that I understand. LLVM permits you to cast any pointer to
any other pointer. If you are using LLVM to generate your code, this
basically has 3 steps:

1. Get a Type* for the function type you want to cast to.
2. Use a cast instruction to actually perform the type cast.

In the code I'm currently working on, I do the following to cast a
function pointer from one type to another. Hopefully the line wrapping
won't totally destroy this.

std::vector<const Type*> paramTypes;

// First parameter: a void pointer
paramTypes.push_back( PointerType::get( Type::getPrimitiveType( Type::SByteTyID ) ) );
		
FunctionType* pthreadFunctionType = FunctionType::get( 
	PointerType::get( Type::getPrimitiveType( Type::SByteTyID ) ), 
	paramTypes, false );
assert( pthreadFunctionType != NULL );

// Cast the function to the pthread function type
Value* castedFunction = new CastInst( function, 
	PointerType::get( pthreadFunctionType ), "", &terminator );



I hope this helps,

Evan Jones