search for: arm_neon_gcc_compatibility

...ntrinsics as "containerized vectors". Perhaps someone on the list from ARM can explain why they did it that way. The extra structures are irrelevant at the llvm IR level and below. The NEON intrinsics in llvm use plain old vector types. If you're using llvm-gcc, you can define the ARM_NEON_GCC_COMPATIBILITY preprocessor macro, and it will switch to a version of the NEON intrinsics that use plain vector types instead of the containerized vectors. For clang, we are planning to do something similar (without requiring the macro) by overloading the intrinsic functions to take either type of arguments, but...

Second question: I was checking NEON instructions this week and the vector types seem to be inside structures. If vector types are considered proper types in LLVM, why pack them inside structures? That results in a lot of boilerplate code for converting and copying the values (about 20 lines of IR) just to call a NEON instruction that, in the end, will be converted into three instructions: VLDR