[LLVMdev] Discussion of eliminating the void type

[Dan Gohman]

On May 8, 2012, at 12:36 AM, Duncan Sands <baldrick at free.fr> wrote:

> Hi Dan,
> 
>>> I am willing to do "eliminating the void type" project.
>> 
>> Is this really a good idea? I'm not going to argue at length
>> about it, but it is worth thinking about.
>> 
>> The only practical downsides of void are when newcomers take C's
>> syntax for functions with no arguments a little too literally, or
>> when they try to create pointers to void. But these problems are
>> quickly caught and easily corrected.
> 
> there's a difference between users of LLVM (which you discuss here)
> and developers of LLVM (people writing transforms etc).  I agree
> that for users it just changes one oddity for another.  However for
> developers it should make things simpler by making the IR more uniform.

As a developer, it would be mildly nice to give stores names.
However, that may be more than offset by the fact that store instructions
would be able to have users. It'd always be safe to RAUW a store with
undef {}, but that's a nuisance.

Dan