[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] Identifying objects within BumpPtrAllocator.

[George Karpenkov via llvm-dev]

Patch available at https://reviews.llvm.org/D51393 <https://reviews.llvm.org/D51393>

I would really love to see this in the static analyzer, but I think all other dumping facilities could greatly benefit as well.

> On Aug 28, 2018, at 5:14 PM, Artem Dergachev via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> In various debug dumps (eg., Clang's -ast-dump), various objects (eg., Stmts and Decls in that -ast-dump) are identified by pointers. It's very reliable in the sense that no two objects would ever have the same pointer at the same time, but it's unpleasant that pointers change across runs. Having deterministic identifiers instead of pointers would aid debugging: imagine a conditional break by object identifier that has not yet been constructed, or simply trying to align two debug dumps of different kind from different runs together. Additionally, pointers are hard to read and memorize; it's hard to notice the difference between 0x7f80a28325e0 and 0x7f80a28325a0, especially when they're a few screens apart.
> 
> Hence the idea: why don't we print the offset into the allocator's memory slab instead of a pointer? We use BumpPtrAllocator all over the place, which boils down to a set of slabs on which all objects are placed in the order in which they are allocated. It is easy for the allocator to identify if a pointer belongs to that allocator, and if so, deteremine which slab it belongs to and at what offset the object is in that slab. Therefore it is possible to identify the object by its (slab index, offset) pair. Eg., "TypedefDecl 0:528" (you already memorized it) instead of "TypedefDecl 0x7f80a28325e0". This could be applied to all sorts of objects that live in BumpPtrAllocators.
> 
> In order to compute such identifier, we only need access to the object and to the allocator. No additional memory is used to store such identifier. Such identifier would also be persistent across runs as long as the same objects are allocated in the same order, which is, i suspect, often the case.
> 
> One of the downsides of this identifier is that it's not going to be the same on different machines, because the same data structure may require different amounts of memory on different hosts. So it wouldn't necessarily help understanding a dump that the user sent you. But it still seems to be better than pointers.
> 
> Should we go ahead and try to implement it?
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