[llvm-dev] [RFC] Displaying source variable locations in llvm-objdump

[Jameson Nash via llvm-dev]

I agree with the others that this seems great! I think this information can
be super helpful for users both in learning and skimming assembly codes.

As a maintainer of a LLVM frontend (JuliaLang), I'm additionally interested
in whether some bits of this make sense to end up in libLLVM itself.
Probably especially the collection code pieces. For context, I've
previously written some code to pretty-print the line-table information as
code comments (sample
https://gist.github.com/vtjnash/2f2b642663655d5fc63ec7321c5bd0bd,
implementation
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/src/disasm.cpp#L167), and
it's been on my mind ever since to figure out if some portion of that made
sense to upstream, if any. And also to figure out how to parse and show the
variable info along it. So even if none of this PR ends up in the libllvm
library, I'd still plan to someday figure out which bits of this PR to copy
into our AssemblyAnnotationWriter to show the variable info in our
front-end also.

But if it does get put in libLLVM, this capability seems like it could be
useful for the other instruction printers too (e.g. IR and MIR). So I'd be
interested to hear if you have any thoughts on what might make sense in a
library, and any other opportunities where I could help collaborate. This
shouldn't need to delay review and merging of your current PR though.

-jameson

On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 1:51 PM Sean Silva via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> This looks fantastic. It will be a big time saver for folks staring at
> assembly.
>
> — Sean Silva
>
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 8:50 AM Oliver Stannard via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi llvm-dev,
>>
>> I've uploaded a prototype patch at https://reviews.llvm.org/D70720 which
>> adds a new feature to llvm-objdump: displaying the location (in
>> registers/memory/etc) of source-level variables alongside the disassembly
>> display. I've put a demo of the output at https://reviews.llvm.org/M2.
>>
>> I have two use-cases in mind for this:
>> * Users reading the disassembly of compiled code. It will be
>> quicker/easier to do this if the disassembly shows which value is in each
>> register and stack slot, rather than the user having to reverse-engineer
>> this by hand.
>> * Compiler developers, who can use it to understand the debug info
>> emitted by the compiler, and spot missing or incorrect debug info. In fact,
>> I've already spotted one LLVM bug while writing this patch: in the function
>> `baz` in M2, the debug info claims that variable `a` is in `r0` between PC
>> addresses 0x14 and 0x8, which isn't true.
>>
>> My questions for the LLVM community are:
>> * Is this an acceptable change for llvm-objdump, or is this adding too
>> much complexity to be worth it?
>> * The patch currently uses unicode box-drawing characters, is this OK? If
>> not, what would people rather see? A plain ASCII version of this, or some
>> completely different format?
>> * The patch displays DWARF expressions in an ad-hoc syntax, which is a
>> mix of C and ARM assembly (square brackets for memory access). Is there an
>> existing syntax which would be better for this? I think it's important that
>> the common cases like "load 4 bytes from memory at SP+4" are displayed
>> concisely.
>>
>> Oliver
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