Currently, opaque pointers are supported in two forms: The
-force-opaque-pointers mode, where all pointers are opaque and
typed pointers do not exist. And as a simple ptr type that can
coexist with typed pointers.
This patch removes support for the mixed mode. You either get
typed pointers, or you get opaque pointers, but not both. In the
(current) default mode, using ptr is forbidden. In -opaque-pointers
mode, all pointers are opaque.
The motivation here is that the mixed mode introduces additional
issues that don't exist in fully opaque mode. D105155 is an example
of a design problem. Looking at D109259, it would probably need
additional work to support mixed mode (e.g. to generate GEPs for
typed base but opaque result). Mixed mode will also end up
inserting many casts between i8* and ptr, which would require
significant additional work to consistently avoid.
I don't think the mixed mode is particularly valuable, as it
doesn't align with our end goal. The only thing I've found it to
be moderately useful for is adding some opaque pointer tests in
between typed pointer tests, but I think we can live without that.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D109290
Bring back the testcase dropped in
1e6303e60c and get it passing by checking
explicitly for `ptr*` in LLParser. Uses `Type::isOpaquePointerTy()` from
ad4bb82809.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D104938
Do this by making opaque pointers a valid pointer element type,
for which we implicitly create an opaque pointer (moving the logic
from getPointerTo into PointerType::get).
We'll never create something like a "pointer to opaque pointer",
but accept it in the API, because a lot of code reasonably assumes
that you can create a pointer to pointer type.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D104902
The opaque pointer type is essentially just a normal pointer type with a
null pointee type.
This also adds support for the opaque pointer type to the bitcode
reader/writer, as well as to textual IR.
To avoid confusion with existing pointer types, we disallow creating a
pointer to an opaque pointer.
Opaque pointer types should not be widely used at this point since many
parts of LLVM still do not support them. The next steps are to add some
very simple use cases of opaque pointers to make sure they work, then
start pretending that all pointers are opaque pointers and see what
breaks.
https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2021-May/150359.html
Reviewed By: dblaikie, dexonsmith, pcc
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D101704
Nikita Popov