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  • Chandler Carruth's avatar
    Add support to the alignment support header for conjuring a character · dea00d7c
    Chandler Carruth authored
    array of a suitable size and alignment for any of a number of different
    types to be stored into the character array.
    
    The mechanisms for producing an explicitly aligned type are fairly
    complex because this operation is poorly supported on all compilers.
    We've spent a fairly significant amount of time experimenting with
    different implementations inside of Google, and the one using explicitly
    expanded templates has been the most robust.
    
    Credit goes to Nick Lewycky for writing the first 20 versions or so of
    this logic we had inside of Google. I based this on the only one to
    actually survive. In case anyone is worried, yes we are both explicitly
    re-contributing and re-licensing it for LLVM. =]
    
    Once the issues with actually specifying the alignment are finished, it
    turns out that most compilers don't in turn align anything the way they
    are instructed. Testing of this logic against both Clang and GCC
    indicate that the alignment constraints are largely ignored by both
    compilers! I've come up with and used a work-around by wrapping each
    alignment-hinted type directly in a struct, and using that struct to
    align the character array through a union. This elaborate hackery is
    terrifying, but I've included testing that caught a terrifying number of
    bugs in every other technique I've tried.
    
    All of this in order to implement a poor C++98 programmers emulation of
    C++11 unrestricted unions in classes such as SmallDenseMap.
    
    llvm-svn: 158597
    dea00d7c
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