[LLVMdev] [llvm-commits] [PATCH] Allow per-thread re-direction of outs()/errs()

[Eli Friedman]

On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Justin Holewinski
<justin.holewinski at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 4:15 PM, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, 03 Jun 2012 12:12:06 -0700
>> Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > On Jun 2, 2012, at 11:01 AM, Mikael Lyngvig wrote:
>> >
>> > > If I may add my two cents:
>> > >
>> > > I am planning to use LLVM as the backend for a compiler I am
>> > > working on.  And I wholeheartedly agree with Justin that it is a
>> > > problem, if LLVM is allowed to freely write to stdout and stderr as
>> > > it is a component which can be used in all sorts of code, be it a
>> > > GUI IDE, a CLI driver, or whatever.
>> >
>> > LLVM should not be doing this.
>> >
>> > > Also, I have a number of times wondered about the somewhat unusual
>> > > use of error strings in LLVM (that you pass in a string, which can
>> > > be assigned a descriptive error message).  Better would be, IMHO,
>> > > to provide an interface along the lines of this:
>> > >
>> > > class ErrorHandler
>> > > {
>> > > public:
>> > >         virtual void Report(ErrorKind kind, uint code, const
>> > > Position &position, const unichar *text, ...) = 0; };
>> > >
>> > > And then let the client, i.e. the frontend, derive from it and
>> > > handle all the output in whichever way it wants to.  The above
>> > > example is probably too complex for LLVM, but that's what I use in
>> > > my compiler.  ErrorKind is ErrorKind_Fatal, ErrorKind_Error, etc.
>> > > Position is simply a filename, a line number, and a character
>> > > position.  unichar is either char or wchar_t, depending on the
>> > > build mode and target environment.
>> >
>> > You're right, this would be better.  We have even already have it :)
>> >
>> >   llvm/Support/ErrorHandling.h
>>
>> This seems to only handle fatal errors. If that's correct, it will
>> probably need to be extended to handle non-fatal errors, warnings,
>> suggestions, notes, etc.
>
>
> Okay, it looks like the combination of llvm/Support/ErrorHandling.h and
> LLVMContext::emitError solves a part of my use case.  I found the
> CrashRecoveryContext class, which seems to allow me to intercept the
> report_fatal_error() calls by installing a custom handler that writes to a
> custom stream and then calls abort() instead of the default exit().
>  Alternatively, it looks like I can just spawn a thread for the LLVM work
> and call pthread_exit() instead of abort() in the error handler, which does
> not require messing with the process signal handlers.  Is there any reason
> to prefer one over the other (thread vs. signal)?
>
> This leaves the following issues:
>
> Why is the error handling stuff in LLVMContext tied to inline asm?  The
> error handler setter is even called setInlineAsmDiagnosticHandler.  Can we
> make this more generic?  I glossed right over the emitError methods the last
> time I read through this stuff because I saw "InlineAsm" everywhere and
> figured it wasn't the right tool for the job! :)

Inline asm is the only place where we have a way of mapping form LLVM
IR to frontend source locations at the moment.

> As Hal points out, this only covers errors at the moment.  Is there any
> resistance to changing emitError to emitDiagnostic and having a
> SourceMgr::DiagKind argument?  This should cover the case where a pass wants
> to emit a warning or info message that is not part to DEBUG.
>
> With LLVMContext::emitDiagnostic, this should cover my use case.

I'm not exactly opposed, but what is your use case?

-Eli