[LLVMdev] Moving towards a singular pointer type

[David Blaikie]

I imagine/assume that distinct pointer types per address space are still
necessary, but I haven't looked at address spaces in any particular detail.
On Feb 8, 2015 1:13 AM, "Kuperstein, Michael M" <
michael.m.kuperstein at intel.com> wrote:

>  One reservation about this being “singular” - we are still going to have
> a different pointer type per address space, right?
>
>
>
> *From:* llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] *On
> Behalf Of *David Blaikie
> *Sent:* Saturday, February 07, 2015 01:38
> *To:* LLVM Developers Mailing List
> *Subject:* [LLVMdev] Moving towards a singular pointer type
>
>
>
> It's an idea been thrown around in a few different threads (including
> Rafael's recent
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20141201/247285.html
> and Chandler's http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-project?rev=226781&view=rev )
> so I'm putting up my hand to volunteer to do the work & interested in
> getting a bit more feedback, thoughts on best approaches, timing, etc.
>
> For some more detail: pointer types (i32*, %foo*, etc) complicate IR
> canonicalization. store + load should be the same instructions given the
> same number of bytes stored to memory, but instead we can have store float,
> store int, etc, etc. Another point Chandler made was that the bitcasts
> involved when a pointer isn't of the right type results in extra IR
> instructions we don't really need.
>
> So the general idea is that all pointers would just be called "ptr"
> (pointer? void*?).
>
> Is this something everyone feels is the right direction? Any reason why it
> wouldn't be?
>
> Beyond that, I'm trying to think about how to do this & I haven't hit on a
> terribly convincing way to do this incrementally. I could introduce the
> alternative form of "store" that provides the magic pointer type, then set
> about adding overloads (is that possible?) of any instruction consuming a
> pointer type, writing the usual LLVM regression tests as I go. Eventually,
> once this looks like it's functioning, I could start porting IRbuilder and
> Clang over to the new store operations & other sources of pointers. Then
> remove the old stuff.
>
> Are IR instructions overloadable like this? If not, would it be worthwhile
> to introduce separate names for the typeless-pointer forms (gep_ptr,
> store_ptr, etc) as a temporary means to have both sets of semantics then
> rename them all back once the old ones are removed?
>
> Other ideas/thoughts?
>
> - David
>
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