[LLVMdev] Interactions between LLVM and the Microsoft C++ runtime

[Tim Foley]

Hello! I am trying to use LLVM 2.4 in a project built with MS Visual Studio
2008. I've been building LLVM with the llvm/win32/llvm.sln solution
successfully for x86 and x64. I haven't yet tried to move to the CMake build
process, so I'd be interested to hear if the following issues have been
resolved on that path.

The problem that I've run into is that the LLVM codebase does certain
"idiomatic" things with STL containers that cause assertion failures in the
Microsoft runtime. Most notably:
- Taking the address of the "first element" of an emtpy vector (either &v[0]
or &*v.begin())
- Using an iterator into a collection (even if just for iterator comparison)
after an erase() or similar on that collection has invalidated all iterators
These assertions can occur in both debug and release configurations
(Microsoft includes certain assertions in the release runtime for
"security").

I do *not* want to start a flamewar on the subject of who is right in this
conflict. The Microsoft STL simply assert-fails on things that are
officially undefined in the spec for the STL (as a matter of policy), and
LLVM just relies on certain pieces of undefined behavior that are typically
benign in most implementations.

I'd be interested to hear if other LLVM users have seen these problems or if
any have solutions to propose. I have a few possible solutions in mind, but
will refrain from going into any of them until I've heard from the
community.

- Tim Foley
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20090120/c797ebe1/attachment.html>