[LLVMdev] aborting on invalid code

[Jon Harrop]

On Saturday 11 October 2008 23:13:46 Chris Lattner wrote:
> On Oct 11, 2008, at 1:01 PM, OvermindDL1 wrote:
> > Which makes me curious, if I submitted a patch that got rid of llvms
> > use of abort()s all over the place, and replaces them with exceptions
> > what is the chance it would be accepted,
>
> There is no chance, we worked hard to eliminate exceptions and are
> aiming to eliminate the last couple remnants of RTTI.  Sending invalid
> code into the backend is violating a very important invariant in the
> API.  I don't see how it would be any different then passing in a null
> pointer or garbage pointer into an API that would then bus error.

One difference is that programs written in safe languages that call LLVM 
should never be able to pass null or garbage pointers to LLVM but they can 
pass invalid data structures or make invalid sequences of calls and it is 
perfectly feasible to handle the errors gracefully if this happens.

The main issue for me is that any bug in my use of LLVM during development 
causes it to die in such a way that I cannot get a stacktrace to find out 
where the error occurred in my OCaml code.

>From your description, I assume the solution is to use signal handlers to 
catch the "abort()" from LLVM in LLVM's OCaml bindings and raise an exception 
on the OCaml side.

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e