Before this patch we had
@a = weak global ...
but
@b = alias weak ...
The patch changes aliases to look more like global variables.
Looking at some really old code suggests that the reason was that the old
bison based parser had a reduction for alias linkages and another one for
global variable linkages. Putting the alias first avoided the reduce/reduce
conflict.
The days of the old .ll parser are long gone. The new one parses just "linkage"
and a later check is responsible for deciding if a linkage is valid in a
given context.
llvm-svn: 214355
The verifier follows GlobalAlias operands so that it can detect cycles of
alias definitions. It was doing this in a way that caused it to also recurse
through initializers for the GlobalValue aliasees, and it would fail when
an initializer refers to a global that is a declaration and not a definition.
This patch causes it to stop recursing when it hits a global definition.
<rdar://problem/17277451>
llvm-svn: 210734
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
On ELF and COFF an alias is just another name for a position in the file.
There is no way to refer to a position in another file, so an alias to
undefined is meaningless.
MachO currently doesn't support aliases. The spec has a N_INDR, which when
implemented will have a different set of restrictions. Adding support for
it shouldn't be harder than any other IR extension.
For now, having the IR represent what is actually possible with current
tools makes it easier to fix the design of GlobalAlias.
llvm-svn: 203705