[llvm-dev] Backward references in assembly absolute expressions

[Rafael Espíndola via llvm-dev]

On 19 April 2016 at 17:19, Petr Hosek via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> While trying to compile an existing codebase which uses handwritten assembly
> with LLVM, I ran into an issue around using backward references in assembly
> absolute expressions. A simple example can be the following snippet:
>
> _foo:
>   .fill 0x100
> _bar:
>   .fill _bar - _foo
> _baz:
>   .fill 0x100
>
> While gas compiles this snippet without any errors, the integrated assembler
> throws an error: expected absolute expression for _bar - _foo.
>
> I haven't found any definition of absolute expression in gas manual, and
> it's arguable whether this case should be considered an absolute expression,
> but at the point of evaluating the directive, the addresses of backward
> labels should be already known so this expression could be treated as
> absolute. A quick search also revealed several bug reports related to this
> issue so it seems like this use case is fairly common.
>
> I'd be happy to try and implement the support for backward references in MC
> (unless someone else is already working on this), but before I do invest
> more time on this issue, I'd like to ask if this is desirable or if the lack
> of support for backward references is intentional?

I think MC is intentionally stricter, but this case shouldn't be too
hard to implement. Since this is uncommon, my suggestion would be to
just create MCFillFragment that takes a MCEXpr for size (or change the
existing one assuming it is still fast enough).

Cheers,
Rafael