LLVM-MC: parsing and handling floats

MC currently parses assembly floats in parseExpression by extracting the string for the Real token and parsing this to a double precision floating point value; this value is then bitcast into an integer and an MCExprConstant is created from this. This has some issues:

· It isn’t possible to determine after parseExpression whether a integer or a floating point value was parsed

· Instructions which expect an integer and use parse expression allow strange operands as the value becomes bitcast to an integer, for example:

add r0, r0, lsl #4.94065645841246544176568792868E-323

will assemble with llvm-mc –triple armv8

as it is read as

add r0, r0, lsl #10

· Expressions allow floats and expressions are attempted to be evaluated , any float in an expression gets represented by its integer representation and this gets used when evaluating an expressions

I attach a patch which is an attempt at fixing the above issues by introducing an MCFloatExpr which stores the float value as an APFloat and also by adding an APFloat to MCValue to allow float assembler immediates, this solves the above by:

· You can determine the type parsed bases on the MCExpr returned

· As most places already check that value returned is MCConstantExpr it means that the MCFloatExprs are only permitted where they have been added in this patch

o This prevents the above instruction from being assembled an instead throws the following error:

“error: invalid immediate shift value”

· The evaluation functions now take an MCValue which can represent either a float or an integer, and the evaluation proceeds based on the type of the value so that float expressions treat the values as floats

o When the types are mixed I convert the integers to floats and continue, so the overall result will be a float so floats can only be used when expected

I would like some feedback on interest in this patch and changing the way floats are handled and any suggestions and criticisms and whether this is a good or bad way of approaching this.

Thanks,

Luke Cheeseman

parser_floats.patch (49.9 KB)

Hello,

Just a ping on this to see if there is any interest on making these kinds of changes to MC and any suggestions on such, I also attach and updated patch which fixes a bug in the previous patch. The bug was due to trying to emit the float to an object file which has been patched. This was exposed when you tried to assign a variable a float value, I’m not sure what the best thing to do in this case is so for now it emits a warning that the float is parsed to quadruple precision. I’ve also added some tests to MC/AsmParser/exprs.s to demonstrate the changes in use.

Thanks,

Luke Cheeseman

parser_floats.patch (56.5 KB)