[llvm-dev] [LLVMdev] Moving towards a singular pointer type (original) (raw)

James Courtier-Dutton via llvm-dev llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Mon Apr 17 07🔞22 PDT 2017

On 16 April 2017 at 22:24, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 16, 2017 at 2:34 AM James Courtier-Dutton via llvm-dev <_ _llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote: Hi,

Did this work ever get done? There was a long thread about it back in 2015. I wish to use IRBuilder. Is there any documentation? How do I use the singular pointer type in GEP, LOAD, STORE instructions? Sorry, no, the work is not complete - for now you'll need to pass the pointer and pointee type to a few of these functions and some will do it for you (Getting the pointee type from the pointer type, etc). I'll hopefully be coming back around to this in 6-9 months to continue on it (finishing off one or two IR constructs, then making sure all the optimizations can cope with this) - Dave

Hi Dave,

I think if the optimizations changed from the concept of the pointer having a type, to instead the memory location itself having the type. Then we might make some good progress in improving the optimizations. If one has the concept of the memory location itself having a type, it is then obvious that any GEP operation is likely to result in a pointer to a different memory location, and therefore have a different type. So, giving a pointer a type is not particularly useful. If the pointer having a type is useful in some way to optimizations, then the GEP instruction should really be a combined GEP and BITCAST instruction.

The singular pointer type (i.e. type-less) goes some way towards achieving this.

Kind Regards

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