[llvm-dev] Best way of implement a fat pointer for C

[Adve, Vikram Sadanand via llvm-dev]

Jie,

Do you actually want a fat-pointer specifically, or do you just want an efficient way to associate metadata with C pointers?  Because (as I‘m sure you know) fat pointers have serious compatibility problems with external libraries, and also may break C programs in other ways due to lack of sound type information.

John Criswell (copied) had created an improved version of Baggy Bounds which gives a efficient and compatible solution at low memory overhead.  I suggest contacting him if you’re interested.

—Vikram Adve

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From: llvm-dev <llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org> on behalf of via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Reply-To: "llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org" <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>, "llvm-dev-request at lists.llvm.org" <llvm-dev-request at lists.llvm.org>
Date: Tuesday, January 7, 2020 at 8:06 AM
To: "llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org" <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: llvm-dev Digest, Vol 187, Issue 17

Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2020 02:45:01 +0000
From: Jie Zhou via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>>
To: Eli Friedman via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>>
Subject: [llvm-dev] Best way of implement a fat pointer for C
Message-ID: <B6510CF7-CC75-4171-AF50-D6730EB068E8 at cs.rochester.edu<mailto:B6510CF7-CC75-4171-AF50-D6730EB068E8 at cs.rochester.edu>>
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Dear All,

I’m working on a project that extends C. I’m adding a new type of pointer
that is a fat pointer. It has some metadata about the pointed object besides
the starting address of the object. Currently I implemented this pointer as
an llvm:StructType. In llvm::Type generation function
llvm::Type *CodeGenTypes::ConvertType(QualType T)
in the case for clang::Type::Pointer, instead of creating an llvm::PointerType
I create an llvm::StructType type for this new type of pointer. And I added some
helper code in llvm::StructType and in multiple places I added code to trick
the compiler to believe sometimes a struct is actually a pointer. Until now
it compile test programs fine with -O0 but I got lots of assertion failures when
compiling with -O1 or -O2 majorly because of the confusion of type mismatch.

LLVM assumes that a PointerType is essentially an Integer (32 or 64 bit depending
on the architecture), and since this is quite a fundamental assumption, I started
to question whether my way of implementing the fat pointer is feasible.
I thought about adding a new llvm type that inherits both llvm:PointerType
and llvm:StructType; but I’m not sure if this is the correct path. It looks like
this demands substantial changes to the compiler including adding code
for bitcode generation. Can you give me some advice on how to implement
a fat pointer in llvm?

Thanks,
- Jie
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