[LLVMdev] [proposal] Extensible IR metadata

[Chris Lattner]

On Sep 11, 2009, at 7:17 PM, Nick Lewycky wrote:

> Dan Gohman wrote:
>> On Sep 11, 2009, at 9:57 AM, Chris Lattner wrote:
>>> Devang's work on debug info prompted this, thoughts welcome:
>>> http://nondot.org/sabre/LLVMNotes/ExtensibleMetadata.txt
>> The document mentions "instructions" a lot. We'll want to be able to
>> apply metadata to ConstantExprs as well at least, if not also  
>> Arguments
>> (think noalias) and other stuff, so it seems best to just talk about
>> "values" instead, and DenseMap<Value *, ...> instead of
>> DenseMap<Instruction *, ...>.
>
> I'm wondering that too. Can we replace LLVM function attributes with  
> metadata? There's been some pushback to adding new function  
> attributes in the past and it would be nice to be able to prototype  
> new ones without having to change all of the vm core.

The pushback has been about adding lots of weird and special purpose  
extensions, not the encoding.

-Chris