Basic Block Chaining

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1

Newbie Question … (sorry if its redundant/silly) …

As I’ve started to develop Stacker, I had assumed that simply adding BasicBlocks to a function in sequence would imply that there is an implicit unconditional branch from the end of one basic block to the start of the next block. Based on the assertion checks that I get when I tried this, I assume that it is required to place a terminating instruction at the end of every basic block even if that should simply be a branch to the start of the next block. Is this indeed the case?

If it is, it would be “user friendly” to simply supply the branch instruction. That is, provide a method on Function that appends a BasicBlock to the end of the block list. If the existing final basic block doesn’t have a terminating instruction, simply add one that points to the block being appended. Is this the RightThing™ or are there good reasons this can’t or shouldn’t be done?

The method I’m thinking of is something like:

Function::chainBasicBlock( BasicBlock* bb )
{
    BasicBlock& previous = this->back();
    TerminatorInst* terminator = previous.getTerminator();
    if ( ! terminator )
    {
        BranchInst* branch = new BranchInst(bb);
        previous.push_back( branch );
    }
    BranchList.push_back( bb );
}

Reid
2

This seems hard to use safely. First, it implies that the last inserted BB will be at the end of the list. Second, and more serious, it has very different behavior if the last BB does or does not have a terminator, which does not seem to be a desirable thing (this could be fixed by making this function illegal, i.e., asserting out, if the last BB does have a terminator).

--Vikram
http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~vadve
http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/

3

Newbie Question .. (sorry if its redundant/silly) ..

No worries, this is good stuff to have archived on the list!

As I've started to develop Stacker, I had assumed that simply adding
BasicBlocks to a function in sequence would imply that there is an
implicit unconditional branch from the end of one basic block to the
start of the next block. Based on the assertion checks that I get when I
tried this, I assume that it is required to place a terminating
instruction at the end of every basic block even if that should simply
be a branch to the start of the next block. Is this indeed the case?

Yup, every basic block must end with a terminator. The terminators are
what build the implicit CFG in LLVM (ie, the presence of terminators
makes pred_iterator & succ_iterator work on basic blocks).

If it is, it would be "user friendly" to simply supply the branch
instruction. That is, provide a method on Function that appends a
BasicBlock to the end of the block list. If the existing final basic
block doesn't have a terminating instruction, simply add one that points
to the block being appended. Is this the RightThing(tm) or are there
good reasons this can't or shouldn't be done?

I agree with Vikram that this would be hard to implement in a generally
useful way. Besides that, you can always do something like this to add a
new basic block, assuming the last basic block in the function is
unterminated:

4

// Create a new branch instruction, jumping to the 'New' block. Specify
// where in the LLVM program to insert it, in this case, at the end of the
// CurrentEnd block.
new BranchInst(New, CurrentEnd.end());

Actually, I just realized that this won't work. This will attempt to
dereference the end iterator, which will cause an assertion to fire.
Instead, use the (just now checked in) constructor that takes an 'insert
at end' block:

new BranchInst(New, 0, 0, CurrentEnd);

The 0's are to indicate that an unconditional branch should be made, not a
conditional branch.

I added some documentation for all of the return and branch ctors
available here:
http://mail.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20031117/009698.html

-Chris