llvm dev - Aug 2012 - [LLVMdev] Generic question about llc asserts

In my experience assertions are a development tool and should not be a part of
the user's experience.

With that in mind, do we expect the end user to ever invoke llc directly?

The reason I ask is that I directly gave llc some bogus command line input and
it asserted.

Is it a bug that a graceful error message and exit from llc wasn't performed
or is it considered "fair game" to generate an assertion because I
didn't go through the larger tool chain?

Jack
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On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Carter, Jack <jcarter at mips.com>
wrote:
> In my experience assertions are a development tool and should not be a part
> of the user's experience.
>
> With that in mind, do we expect the end user to ever invoke llc directly?
>
> The reason I ask is that I directly gave llc some bogus command line input
> and it asserted.
>
> Is it a bug that a graceful error message and exit from llc wasn't
performed
> or is it considered "fair game" to generate an assertion because
I didn't go
> through the larger tool chain?
Generally, it's a bug; if there's some construct we can't generate
code for, we should be using report_fatal_error.

Granted, bugs like that have much lower priority than bugs which can
be triggered from realistic code.

-Eli

Thanks
________________________________________
From: Eli Friedman [eli.friedman at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2012 1:12 PM
To: Carter, Jack
Cc: List
Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] Generic question about llc asserts

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Carter, Jack <jcarter at mips.com>
wrote:
> In my experience assertions are a development tool and should not be a part
> of the user's experience.
>
> With that in mind, do we expect the end user to ever invoke llc directly?
>
> The reason I ask is that I directly gave llc some bogus command line input
> and it asserted.
>
> Is it a bug that a graceful error message and exit from llc wasn't
performed
> or is it considered "fair game" to generate an assertion because
I didn't go
> through the larger tool chain?
Generally, it's a bug; if there's some construct we can't generate
code for, we should be using report_fatal_error.

Granted, bugs like that have much lower priority than bugs which can
be triggered from realistic code.

-Eli