8-bit Character support on architectures were the smallest addressable unit size is 64-bit in Clang and LLVM

CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

Identifiers

10.5446/56885 (DOI)

Publisher

FOSDEM VZW

Release Date

2022

Language

English

Content Metadata

Subject Area

Computer Science

Genre

Conference/Talk

Abstract

Clang and LLVM have a great history of supporting a great variety of CPUs, from 8- to 64-bits assuming they all have a smallest size of an addressable unit of 8-bits words. Despite the fact that a lot of types and there alignment can be defined with the “target datalayout” string, the “character” and “short” type have been hard-coded into clang and llvm.