[LLVMdev] Alloca Instruction

[Nick Lewycky]

kapil anand wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was reading the description of run-time stack and alloca instructions 
> in LLVM IR and have a question about the same. Do LLVM alloca 
> instructions allow the processing on stack across some alloca blocks?
> 
> For example, is following code valid?

Yes, it's valid. Alloca, like the other non-PHI instructions, only 
requires that all uses be dominated by the definition.

There's a couple things to know about alloca. One is that you can't free 
an alloca, so you may want to avoid using them in loops. The other is 
that the -mem2reg pass will only look for a contiguous list of alloca's 
at the beginning of the first block which is why nearly all the LLVM IR 
you'll see puts them together at the top.

Nick