This patch changes GlobalAlias to point to an arbitrary ConstantExpr and it is
up to MC (or the system assembler) to decide if that expression is valid or not.
This reduces our ability to diagnose invalid uses and how early we can spot
them, but it also lets us do things like
@test5 = alias inttoptr(i32 sub (i32 ptrtoint (i32* @test2 to i32),
i32 ptrtoint (i32* @bar to i32)) to i32*)
An important implication of this patch is that the notion of aliased global
doesn't exist any more. The alias has to encode the information needed to
access it in its metadata (linkage, visibility, type, etc).
Another consequence to notice is that getSection has to return a "const char *".
It could return a NullTerminatedStringRef if there was such a thing, but when
that was proposed the decision was to just uses "const char*" for that.
llvm-svn: 210062
This matches gcc's behavior. It also seems natural given that aliases
contain other properties that govern how it is accessed (linkage,
visibility, dll storage).
Clang still has to be updated to expose this feature to C.
llvm-svn: 209759
This patch changes the design of GlobalAlias so that it doesn't take a
ConstantExpr anymore. It now points directly to a GlobalObject, but its type is
independent of the aliasee type.
To avoid changing all alias related tests in this patches, I kept the common
syntax
@foo = alias i32* @bar
to mean the same as now. The cases that used to use cast now use the more
general syntax
@foo = alias i16, i32* @bar.
Note that GlobalAlias now behaves a bit more like GlobalVariable. We
know that its type is always a pointer, so we omit the '*'.
For the bitcode, a nice surprise is that we were writing both identical types
already, so the format change is minimal. Auto upgrade is handled by looking
through the casts and no new fields are needed for now. New bitcode will
simply have different types for Alias and Aliasee.
One last interesting point in the patch is that replaceAllUsesWith becomes
smart enough to avoid putting a ConstantExpr in the aliasee. This seems better
than checking and updating every caller.
A followup patch will delete getAliasedGlobal now that it is redundant. Another
patch will add support for an explicit offset.
llvm-svn: 209007
