[LLVMdev] n-bit bytes for clang/llvm

Tyro Software
Tue, 10 Mar 2015 10:12:28 -0000

Back in 2009 there was some discussion of the practicality of supporting
char sizes greater than 8-bit:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2009-September/thread.html#6349
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2009-September/thread.html#26025

with the consensus seemingly being "quite doable, please get a good patch
and submit".

However the current code appears (to my neophyte eyes) to be explicitly
8-bit, e.g. one instance called out in the mail thread remains:

/// isString - This method returns true if this is an array of i8.
bool ConstantDataSequential::isString() const {
  return isa<ArrayType>(getType()) &&
getElementType()->isIntegerTy(8);
}

I didn't find anything related beyond this mail thread such as a discussion
of a patch but of course I might be searching too narrowly - perhaps
someone here can recall whether it went any further, whether insurmountable
barriers do exist, etc?

Thanks for whatever advice & thread necromancy you can offer,
Tyro
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