[LLVMdev] Making GEP into vector illegal?

[Daniel M Gessel]

In Joe programmer language (i.e. C ;) ), are we basically talking  
about disallowing:

float4 a;
float* ptr_z = &a.z;

?

Won't programmers just resort to:

float4 a;
float* ptr_z = (float*)(&a) + 3;

?




On Oct 14, 2008, at 3:55 PM, Mon Ping Wang wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Something like a sequential type makes sense especially in light of
> what Duncan is point out. I agree with Chris that a vector shouldn't
> be treated as a short array.  Vectors have different alignment rules
> and operations.  It make senses to talk about doing operations on
> vectors like add or speak of having a mask for a vector.  I don't feel
> like that it make sense to talk of arrays in that context.  Also, I
> don't think of looping over a vector in the same sense of an array.
> Also for me, a pointer to an 2nd vector element feels very similar to
> getting a pointer to a 2nd word of an 64 bit integer and less than a
> pointer to the 2nd element in an array.  If we go toward treating the
> array model, theoritically one could use extract or insert for an
> array or we get rid of those operations, and have clients uses GEP to
> modify a vector element.  Either of them seems wrong to me for  
> vectors.
>
> -- Mon Ping
>
>
> On Oct 14, 2008, at 12:08 PM, Chris Lattner wrote:
>
>>
>> On Oct 14, 2008, at 11:02 AM, Duncan Sands wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Mon Ping,
>>>
>>>> I would like to make it illegal to GEP into a vector as I think it
>>>> is
>>>> cleaner and more consistent.  Opinions?  Comments?
>>>
>>> now that arrays are first class types, I think vectors should become
>>> a subclass of ArrayType.  This would get rid of a lot of duplicated
>>> code, and also fix a bunch of problems with vectors (eg: that sizes
>>> are wrong; currently we think that a <n x i1> has length n bits, and
>>> that a vector <n x x86_fp80> has length 80*n bits, both of which are
>>> untenable).
>>
>>
>> I'm happy about factoring the code better, but a vectortype isn't an
>> arraytype (isa<ArrayType>(V) should be false).  Maybe a common base
>> class (like sequential type) would be better?
>>
>>> From this point of view you have to allow GEP into a
>>> vector; the conclusion I suppose is that codegen needs to replace
>>> GEP+load or GEP+store with an extract or insert operation.
>>
>>
>> With that logic, there is no difference at all between an array and
>> vector... I disagree very strongly about this.
>>
>> -Chris
>
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