[LLVMdev] Appending linkage

[Talin]

This is an issue I raised a while ago, but I wanted to know if the situation
had improved at all recently.
The issue is determining the number of elements in an array that has
appending linkage.

The obvious course would be to use a constant GEP. Suppose we have N
modules, each containing a global variable with appending linkage whose
initializer is an array of size M containing elements of type T. Within each
module the type of the variable should be [M x T]*. After linking, the
appended array would have N * M elements, so it's type should be [(N*M) x
T]*. Therefore a GEP of indices (0, 1) ought to dereference the pointer and
point to the end of the array. Calculating the array size would be a simple
matter of subtracting the pointer to the end from the pointer to the
beginning.

However, this does not work. The GEP always behaves as if it were operating
on the array before appending - so the GEP gives you back a pointer to the
Mth element, not the NxMth element. Note that I also tried just GEP (1),
which gives a similar result, although I would expect it not to work at all,
since pointers are only supposed to be dereferenced with an index of 0.

When I look at the generated bitcode, I see that the appended array does
indeed have a type of [(N*M) x T]*, but the "end" pointer initializer
bitcasts the result to [1 x T] (if I use GEP 0 1) or [M x T] (if I use GEP
1) before doing the GEP. And I did not put that cast there.

The previous time I brought this up, there were several solutions suggested,
all of which involved writing a custom link pass that would either place a
sentinel value at the end of the array, or would store the count of array
elements in some other variable. Well, I did this, but it only works for
arrays that the linker has special knowledge of - that is, I don't want to
just blindly start modifying every appending linkage symbol, so I have to
have some means to tell the linker which arrays require special processing.
For now it's just a list of hard-coded symbol names, but that means that
every time I add another appending linkage array to the runtime library, I
have to go and modify the linker program.

I'd like to find a more general solution to this problem. Or at least have
someone tell me that I am doing something wrong.

-- 
-- Talin
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