[llvm-dev] reinterpret_cast of pointer-to-member

[Deep Majumder via llvm-dev]

Hi everyone,

I am working on a patch that involves reinterpret_cast of pointer to member. Working on Godbolt, it seems that the casts don't always make sense. Take a look at https://godbolt.org/z/6E7aoK.

Both c and cs are supposed to point to the same field. However, c has the wrong offset (12) while cs has the right offset (0). This can be seen from the return value also (returns 16 instead of the expected 29).

So my query is: are reinterpret_cast on pointer-to-member considered undefined behaviour? Because different optimisation levels give different answers (try -O2).

Warm regards,

Deep

[Tobias Hahn via llvm-dev]

Hi Deep, I'm not a language lawyer, but I believe it is as you suspect:

> The result of this conversion is unspecified, except in the following cases: [...]
> (10.2) Converting a prvalue of type “pointer to data member of X of type T1” to the type “pointer to data member of Y of type T2” (where the alignment requirements of T2 are no stricter than those of T1) and back to its original type yields the original pointer-to-member value.

(https://timsong-cpp.github.io/cppwp/n4861/expr.reinterpret.cast#10)

I would interpret that as: the cast expression is legal code, but using the result with the pointer-to-member-access operators is undefined behavior unless you reinterpret_cast them back to the original type first.

My take on this is that this language feature allows you to do type erasure on a pointer-to-member as long as you know the original type at the client site.

Best
Tobias

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From: cfe-dev <cfe-dev...@lists.llvm.org> on behalf of Deep Majumder via cfe-dev <cfe...@lists.llvm.org>
Sent: Wednesday, 3 March 2021 16:10
To: llvm-dev; cfe...@lists.llvm.org
Subject: [cfe-dev] reinterpret_cast of pointer-to-member

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