[LLVMdev] aborting on invalid code

[Vikram S. Adve]

On Oct 13, 2008, at 12:42 PM, Chris Lattner wrote:

>>
>> Currently there no way to recover if the IR contains some
>> construct that codegen can't handle. This is unfortunate for some
>> applications.
>
> I completely agree, but these should not be fixed with exceptions:
> this should be fixed by adding a direct failure reporting mechanism.
>
> -Chris


Andrew and I (and another faculty member here) are working on software  
recovery techniques for run-time errors that would otherwise be fatal,  
so I am curious about this answer.  Why do you think these cases  
should not be fixed with exceptions?  What if a client wants to  
*recover* in some manner, e.g., by emulating missing instructions or  
transforming the code (or any of a variety of other recovery  
strategies), but not just report a failure to the external world?

--Vikram
Associate Professor, Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://llvm.org/~vadve