DISCUSS.org's sentinel-fill idea, built as two builtins because the author
asked for both: a memset with a byte the program picks, and the fixed
DE AD BE EF pattern a hex dump reads as DEADBEEF.
Both are spelled the way (zeroed) is — the value of whatever type is
expected of them — so (set grid (filled 0xFF)) fills a place and there is
no second, place-taking form beside set.
What may be filled is numbers, and structs and fixed arrays built out of
them. Everything else is refused by name: a filled dyn is a collector root
pointing at nothing, a filled Vec header frees a wild address, a filled
slice length is a bounds check that passes, and a filled bool is an i1 to
LLVM and a whole byte to x86, which is the one divergence this feature
cannot have.
The byte fill is llvm.memset / rep stosb. The four-byte pattern cannot be
a memset on either side — the intrinsic takes one repeated i8 — so it is a
counted dword loop in emit.ml and rep stosd in x86.ml, with the pattern
bytes and their little-endian word living once, in Emit. A size that is
not a multiple of four ends on DE, DE AD, or DE AD BE.
Joseph Ferano
99f519ba6f