[llvm-dev] DW_OP_implicit_pointer design/implementation in general

[David Blaikie via llvm-dev]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 1:27 PM Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com> wrote:

>
>
> > On Nov 14, 2019, at 1:21 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hey folks,
> >
> > Would you all mind having a bit of a design discussion around the
> feature both at the DWARF level and the LLVM implementation? It seems like
> what's currently being proposed/reviewed (based on the DWARF feature as
> spec'd) is a pretty big change & I'm not sure I understand the motivation,
> exactly.
> >
> > The core point of my confusion: Why does describing the thing a pointer
> points to require describing a named variable that it points to? What if it
> doesn't point to a named variable?
>
> Without having looked at the motivational text when the feature was
> proposed to DWARF, my assumption was that this is similar to how bounds for
> variable-length arrays are implemented, where a (potentially) artificial
> variable is created by the compiler in order to have something to refer to.


I /sort/ of see that case as a bit different, because the array type needs
to refer back into the function potentially (to use frame-relative, etc). I
could think of other ways to do that in hindsight (like putting the array
type definition inside the function to begin with & having the count
describe the location directly, for instance).


> In retrospect I find the entire specification of DW_OP_implicit_pointer to
> be strangely specific/limited (why one hard-coded offset instead of an
> arbitrary expression?), but that ship has sailed for DWARF 5 and I'm to
> blame for not voicing that concern earlier.
>

Sure, but we don't have to implement it if we don't find it to be super
useful/worthwhile, right? (if something else would be particularly more
general/useful we could instead implement that as an extension, though of
course there's cost to that in terms of consumer support, etc)


>
>
> -- adrian
>
> >
> > Seems like there should be a way to describe that situation - and that
> doing so would be a more general solution than one limited to only
> describing pointers that point to named variables. And would be a simpler
> implementation in LLVM - without having to deconstruct variables during
> optimizations, etc, to track one variable's value being concretely related
> to another variable's value.
> >
> > - David
>
>
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