[LLVMdev] Offset to C++ structure members

[Paul J. Lucas]

Given the C++ struct:

	struct S {
	  string a;
	  string b;
	};

I also have C "thunk" functions that I call from LLVM code:

	// calls S::S()
	void* T_S_M_new( void *heap );

	// call string::assign(char const*)
	void T_string_M_assign_Pv( void *that, void *value );

I want to do the LLVM equivalent of the following C++ (where that 's' is pointer to an instance of 'S'):

	s->b.assign( "Hello, world!" ); // assign to S::b

If there were an S member function:

	void S::assign_to_b( char const* );

it would be easy to write a "thunk" wrapper to call it.  However, assume that there is no such S member function.  I therefore need a way to get the offset of 'b' and add it to 's' so that I can call T_string_M_assign_Pv() on it.

Given this helper function:

	template<class ClassType,class MbrType> inline
	ptrdiff_t mbr_offset_of( MbrType ClassType::*p ) {
	  ClassType const *const c = static_cast<ClassType*>( nullptr );
	  return reinterpret_cast<ptrdiff_t>( &(c->*p) );
	}

I could take a Pointer to an S, use ptrtoint, add the offset, use inttoptr, and use that pointer to pass as the 'this' argument to T_string_M_assign_Pv().  The LLVM code generated via the IRBuilder is:

  %0 = call i8* @T_S_M_new(i8* %heap)
  %1 = ptrtoint i8* %0 to i64
  %2 = add i64 %1, 8           ; 8 is what's returned by mbr_offset_of()
  %3 = inttoptr i64 %2 to i8*
  call void @T_string_M_assign_A_Pv(i8* %3, i8* getelementptr inbounds ([15 x i8]* @0, i64 0, i64 0))

The code does in fact work.  My questions are:

* Is this an "OK" thing to do?
* Is there a better way?

- Paul

P.S.: I don't explicitly put the getelementptr instruction in there.  That's something the IRBuilder does all by itself.