I’d like to propose that we add an attribute which expresses the notion that the specified value is either null or dereferenceable up to a fixed size. (Note the xor.) Our current dereferenceable(n) attribute doesn’t quite fit the bill, it implies that the pointer is non-null. Similarly, our nonnull attribute says nothing about dereferenceability.
There are two syntax proposals below, but let’s start with the motivation.
These semantics arise in a number of common cases:
- In C, malloc is defined to either return null, or a dereferenceable region of the size requested.
- In Java, any reference is either null or dereferenceable to the size of the static type.
- I suspect this will also be useful for Julia, Go, Rust, and others for similar reasons.
With such an attribute available, we can increase the effectiveness of LICM. We can’t move a load outside a loop if it might introduce a fault. Knowing that a pointer is deferefenceable(N) at a location (i.e. the loop preheader) allows us to satisfy this constraint. In the near term, we can simply add a case in the dereferenceability analysis that combines the new attribute and isKnownNonNull. This won’t be too effective out of the box, but will enable testing with llvm.assumes and might catch some cases. I will probably also add a case to look at the controlling branch to the loop preheader since in practice that tends to be where a unswitched null check would live.
Longer term, I plan on introducing a mechanism to have isKnownNonNull consider trivially dominating conditions. This will make the proposed attribute more powerful, but is explicitly not part of this proposal. That’s a lot more work and will need a fair amount of discussion on its own.
Now, on to possible syntax.
Option 1
We could simply redefine our current notion of dereferenceable(N) to allow the pointer to be null. Since we already have the nonnull attribute, this wouldn’t loose any expressibility. Frontends would need to be modified to emit both dererefenceable(N) and nonnull if they want to preserve the same semantics. Most of the existing utility functions for dereferenceability in LLVM would be modified to just check both. There’d need to by a forward migration added to the bytecode parser to enable upgrade from the old semantics to the new.
This is my preferred option, but in offline conversation, Hal objected to this change. I’ll let him describe his objection since I was never quite clear on it.
Option 2
We introduce a new attribute with the desired semantics. This results in a collection of confusing overlapping attributes, but is otherwise straight forward.
My proposed strawman syntax would be: dereferenceable_or_null(N). (Bikeshedding welcomed.) This would be a legal parameter and return attribute on both function declarations and call sites (i.e. calls and invokes). As with above, we’d extend all the places that currently consider ‘dereferenceable’ to consider the new attribute in combination with isKnownNonNull.
Philip