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
This adds support for opaque pointers to expandAddToGEP() by always
generating an i8 GEP for opaque pointers. After looking at some other
cases (constexpr GEP folding, SROA GEP generation), I've come around
to the idea that we should use i8 GEPs for opaque pointers, because
the alternative would be to guess a GEP type from surrounding code,
which will not be reliable. Ultimately, i8 GEPs is where we want to
end up anyway, and opaque pointers just make that the natural choice.
There are a couple of other places in SCEVExpander that check pointer
element types, I plan to update those when I run across usable test
coverage that doesn't assert elsewhere.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D105398
Nikita Popov