Best way of implement a fat pointer for C

Clang Frontend
1

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
2

Jie, I’m no expert but LLVM does do function pointers as a pointer type with extra data in IR. I just checked and it’s mentioned in Global Variables and Function Addresses of the LLVM IR manual. Maybe exploring how that is implemented as it seems similar would be a place to start. The data would be different i.e. no function arguments as its a data object but the ideas should be similar in that its a pointer with more meta information than a normal pointer. Maybe that helps, Nick