The various gimple types are currently implemented using a hand-coded C inheritance scheme, with a "union gimple_statement_d" holding the various possible structs for a statement.
The following series of patches convert it to a C++ class hierarchy, using the existing structs, eliminating the union. The "gimple" typedef changes from being a (union gimple_statement_d *) to being a: (struct gimple_statement_base *) There are no virtual functions in the new code: the sizes of the various structs are unchanged. It makes use of "is-a.h", using the as_a <T> template function to perform downcasts, which are checked (via gcc_checking_assert) in an ENABLE_CHECKING build, and are simple casts in an unchecked build, albeit it in an inlined function rather than a macro. For example, one can write: gimple_statement_phi *phi = as_a <gimple_statement_phi> (gsi_stmt (gsi)); and then directly access the fields of the phi, as a phi. The existing accessor functions in gimple.h become somewhat redundant in this scheme, but are preserved. I believe this is a superior scheme to the C implementation: * We can get closer to compile-time type-safety, checking the gimple code once and downcasting with an as_a, then directly accessing fields, rather than going through accessor functions that check each time. In some places we may want to replace a "gimple" with a subclass e.g. phis are always of the phi subclass, to get full compile-time type-safety. * This scheme is likely to be easier for newbies to understand. * Currently in gdb, dereferencing a gimple leads to screenfuls of text, showing all the various union values. With this, you get just the base class, and can cast it to the appropriate subclass. * We're working directly with the language constructs, rather than rolling our own, and thus other tools can better understand the code. For example, you can see Doxygen's rendering of the gimple class hierarchy (in the modified code) here: http://fedorapeople.org/~dmalcolm/gcc/2013-08-28/doxygen/html/structgimple__statement__base.html The names of the structs are rather verbose. I would prefer to also rename them all to eliminate the "_statement" component: "gimple_statement_base" -> "gimple_base" "gimple_statement_phi" -> "gimple_phi" "gimple_statement_omp" -> "gimple_omp" etc, but I didn't do this to mimimize the patch size. But if the core maintainers are up for that, I can redo the patch series with that change also. The patch is in 6 parts; all of them are needed together. * Patch 1 of 6: This patch adds inheritance to the various gimple types, eliminating the initial baseclass fields, and eliminating the union gimple_statement_d. All the types remain structs. They become marked with GTY((user)). * Patch 2 of 6: This patch ports various accessor functions within gimple.h to the new scheme. * Patch 3 of 6: This patch is autogenerated by "refactor_gimple.py" from https://github.com/davidmalcolm/gcc-refactoring-scripts There is a test suite "test_refactor_gimple.py" which may give a clearer idea of the changes that the script makes (and add confidence that it's doing the right thing). The patch converts code of the form: { GIMPLE_CHECK (gs, SOME_CODE); gimple_subclass_get/set_some_field (gs, value); } to code of this form: { some_subclass *stmt = as_a <some_subclass> (gs); stmt->some_field = value; } It also autogenerates specializations of is_a_helper <T>::test equivalent to a GIMPLE_CHECK() for use by is_a and as_a. * Patch 4 of 6: This patch implement further specializations of is_a_helper <T>::test, for gimple_has_ops and gimple_has_mem_ops. * Patch 5 of 6: This patch does the rest of porting from union access to subclass access (all the fiddly places that the script in patch 3 couldn't handle). * Patch 6 of 6: This patch adds manual implementation of the GTY hooks, written by heavily-editing the autogenerated gtype-desc.c code from an earlier incarnation. It implements the equivalent of chain_next for gimple statements. Successfully bootstrapped and tested on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu: all testcases show the same results as an unpatched build (relative to r202029). OK for trunk? gcc/Makefile.in | 2 +- gcc/coretypes.h | 5 +- gcc/ggc.h | 6 +- gcc/gimple-iterator.c | 72 +-- gcc/gimple-pretty-print.c | 6 +- gcc/gimple-pretty-print.h | 4 +- gcc/gimple-streamer-in.c | 19 +- gcc/gimple-streamer-out.c | 2 +- gcc/gimple.c | 819 +++++++++++++++++++++++- gcc/gimple.h | 1545 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------- gcc/gimplify.c | 4 +- gcc/system.h | 2 +- gcc/tree-cfg.c | 6 +- gcc/tree-inline.c | 2 +- gcc/tree-phinodes.c | 39 +- gcc/tree-ssa-ccp.c | 2 +- 16 files changed, 1860 insertions(+), 675 deletions(-) -- 1.7.11.7