[LLVMdev] MCJIT and Lazy Function Creators

[Óscar Fuentes]

"Kaylor, Andrew" <andrew.kaylor at intel.com> writes:

> I guess we'll have to add that to the list of things that needs to be
> done to replace the old JIT.
>
> In the projects I've worked on that use MCJIT, we've been using
> getPointerToFunction and then calling it from outside the MCJIT
> engine, but I suppose that the generic handling in runFunction would
> be useful in some cases.

FWIW, in my language `main' and other externally-callable function does
not have a fixed signature: it can take and return any type(s) from a
set of well-known types. Most test cases here are failing because, for
returning a string, `main' is called with a pointer parameter of type
[i8 x 8]* pointing to the space reserved for the returned value. Even
that simple case is not supported by MCJIT::runFunction. Looking at how
JIT::runFunction implements the generic case I can see why MCJIT can't
do the same: JIT::runFunction creates and calls a stub function on the
fly, which is then used for calling the real function. This is not
doable with MCJIT, at least not easily.

I could do what you describe: get the pointer to the function and
implement all the handling for my language's supported types and a
reasonably large number of parameters. That sort of exercise on
combinatorics could work for me, but others would be forced to replicate
the work for they own projects and that's precisely what a library
should avoid. And, possibly, on some cases a user might need a truly
generic method: think on a paremeter or return value with user-defined
type (`user' here means the guy who wrote the code being compiled, not
the compiler's writer.)