[LLVMdev] Expose int1, int2, intxxx to Higlh Level Languages

[Fano il primo]

Good Morning,

it is a lot of time that I'm lurking this mailing list and the LLVM
documentation and when I've seen that the assembler bitcode uses this
special int types a question arises in my mind, why they have not
added them as C/C++ extensions?

The bool type in C is an hack being defined as a unsigned char or an
int, but it should be naturally an int1 in LLVM, right? (I don't know
if there is code that depends to the fact that it's size is 4 to work
it would be wrong code).

This types could be useful to replace the bitfield struct with a more
natural construct too:

typedef struct printer_status_t {
      int1 pre_paper_out; // 1/true if the paper is in pre-out, 0 /
false if paper present
      int1 paper_out;  // 1/true if paper is out, 0/ false if paper is not ended
      int1 drawer_opened; // 1/true if drawer is opened, 0/false if
drawer is closed
      int1 printer_offline; // 1/ true if printer is offline, 0/false if online
      int1  filler[4]; // or int4 filler, I imagine not to be possible
to have them all for C
} printer_status;

Imagine the possibility for an Object Language as C++ you could
replace the external libraries classes a BigNumber creating simply a
class Number (an integer with size 1 to 2^80 bit) "allocating" space
on demand for it so that:

Number n1 = 1; // only a bit is needed
Number n2 = 3 // only 2 bits are needed
Number n3 = 99000 // Only 5 bits are needed
Number n4 = 1'000'000'000'000'000'000'000'000'000 // log2(n4) bitsare needed

I imagine this would be valid only for the bitcode itself and when it
need to be compiled is probable that padding should be needed (or some
strange Kludge to represent more that an int64 on a X86 on 32 mode).

A character expressed as UTF32 could be expressed as an Int21, if one wants!

I have intention this summer to play with Kaledoscopie and to try to
derive a toy Object Language from it, it would be my first compiler
:-)
The "Number" class would be one of the first I'll implement (after
Object and... null) but I needed to known if it is possible first...

Thanks for your attention!