[LLVMdev] Overflow trap

[Peter S. Housel]

Several instruction set architectures include arithmetic operations that can
trap on overflow, or support this feature with a separate
trap-on-overflow-flag instruction (such as the x86 INTO instruction).

I am adding a back-end to the Open Dylan compiler to generate LLVM IR. The
original back-end, which generates x86 machine code, makes use of the INTO
instruction, and the runtime turns the resulting INT 4 into a language-level
exception. In order to support this not-uncommon requirement using LLVM, I
see three alternatives:

1. Add llvm.sadd.with.overflow.trap.*, . intrinsics corresponding to the
current llvm.sadd.with.overflow.*, . intrinsics to LLVM and the current code
generators.

2. Add a single llvm.trap.overflow intrinsic to LLVM and the current code
generators, and ensure that the code generators can generate the proper
arithmetic-with-overflow-trap or trap-on-overflow-flag instruction when it
is executed conditionally based on the output of one of the
llvm.sadd.with.overflow.* etc. intrinsics.

3. Don't try to solve this problem for LLVM in general but use inline
assembly for these few operations in my back-end.

Which alternative should I pursue? The third is obviously the easiest for
me, but other LLVM users would benefit from the other two.

-Peter-

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