[LLVMdev] Quick Question...

[Chris Lattner]

On Oct 20, 2009, at 11:12 AM, Jon McLachlan wrote:

> Hey Everyone,
>
>   I know that LLVM subscribes to the notion of "progress over
> backwards compatibility."  And in that spirit, maybe someone could
> help me better understand the motivation behind removing the
> MallocInst?  Is there a design doc anywhere?

hi Jon,

The foremost problem with mallocinst is that it didn't support 64-bit  
hosts.  This caused 64-bit apps that allocated more than 4G of memory  
(yes this really does happen) to get silently mis-compiled.  We've  
long been looking to remove mallocinst (it doesn't add any value over  
a direct call to malloc) as redundant, this gave us a reason to do it.

-Chris