[LLVMdev] Static ctors in llvm::Attribute

[Chris Lattner]

Hi Kostya,

One unexpected piece of fallout in your recent attributes change (r148553) was that it introduced a bunch of static constructors into .o files that #include Attributes.h, due to stuff like this:

const Attributes None      (0);     ///< No attributes have been set
const Attributes ZExt      (1<<0);  ///< Zero extended before/after call
const Attributes SExt      (1<<1);  ///< Sign extended before/after call
const Attributes NoReturn  (1<<2);  ///< Mark the function as not returning

We really don't like static ctors in LLVM, because it is often used as a library, and they cause startup-time performance hits and other bad news.  I'm surprised we don't have an explicit section about it in the CodingStandards, but we do have:
http://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#ll_iostream

... which talks about the same thing.

Anyway, as it turns out, LLVM can optimize those static ctors away in some cases, but not all (e.g. -O0).  This was found because LLDB builds with -Wstatic-constructor and this header change is causing a flood of warnings.


I can think of two ways to fix this.  One is to replace all of these with "get" functions, which would be really really ugly.  A better change would be to replace these with enums, eliminating the whole problem.  Are 64-bit enums portable enough to be used here?

If not, we could split this into two enums (one for attributes 0-31 and one for attributes 32+), and define the appropriate constructors in Attribute that take them, and define the appropriate operator| implementations that merge them (returning an Attribute).

Can you take a look at this?  It's a pretty big problem for LLDB and other clients that use -Wstatic-constructor.

-Chris