[LLVMdev] TableGen: Requesting feedback for "TGContext"

[Sean Silva]

Hi all, I'm sure that the last thing that you want to think about is
TableGen's guts, but I'm pursuing a course in bringing TableGen up to
snuff with the rest of LLVM.

Basically, I would like to introduce a "TGContext" class (by analogy
with LLVMContext) to harbor a proper unique'd type system and BumpPtr
allocate all of TableGen's data (RecTy's, Record's, Init's, etc). This
change should have no effect on the TableGen backends, simply being a
refactoring of the internals.

One huge bonus in particular from centralizing all of the memory
allocation is that I plan to hack in a custom memory allocator (in a
local branch) which distributes objects randomly in memory, which will
definitively flush out *all* pointer-value-as-map-key non-determinism
inside TableGen.

Does anybody have anything else they think should go into TGContext or
any other responsibilities it should have? Or any feedback about the
idea in general?

I'm also hoping that this change should loosen up some of the
calcification that has accumulated on TableGen and get the ball
rolling for transitioning dynamic_cast<> to dyn_cast<> and eliminating
exceptions, along with general improvements in reliability and
performance. Along the way I'm also hoping to pull together proper
reference documentation for the language as it stands right now.

-- Sean Silva