Re: Pointer arithmetic error

[Tommy Thorn <tommy@numba-tu.com>]

David Given wrote:
> sparse is working rather well, and seems to be one of the better
> compiler front ends that I've found. The linearising support is
> particularly helpful. I have, however, been finding that the learning
> curve is rather steep --- the API shows a lot of signs of having grown
> organically over time --- and I've had to build big chunks of code that
> I'm sure are unnecessary. For example, in order to generate the right
> kind of code, I need to figure out whether a pseudo contains an integer,
> float or pointer. The only way I've found out to do this is to
> recursively follow the chain of pseudo->def pointers until I find an
> instruction with enough type information attached to it to figure it
> out. I'm sure there must be an easier way of doing this...
>
> (BTW, given a function symbol, how do I find its return type? I can find
> the list of arguments, but there's nothing in struct symbol that seems
> to refer to the return value...)
>
> I am intending to release my project once done, of course, and I hope
> people will find it useful, but I'm not sure how much general use it
> will be; I've basically ripped out and replaced the register allocator /
> storage mechanism from my back end as I didn't understand it and didn't
> need the complexity. That should probably all get rewritten properly at
> some stage, but right now I'm focusing on getting things working...
>   

What I had in mind would not even perform register allocation or any 
attempt at optimization. Such only obscures how to use sparse as a compiler.

Cheers,
Tommy