I ran into an issue where I did a method call on a nil interface and it
resulted in a HardFault. Luckily I quickly realized what was going on so
I could fix it, but I think undefined behavior is definitely the wrong
behavior in this case. This commit therefore changes such calls to cause
a nil panic instead of introducing undefined behavior.
This does have a code size impact. It's relatively minor, much lower
than I expected. When comparing the before and after of the drivers
smoke tests (probably the most representative sample available), I found
that most did not change at all and those that did change, normally not
more than 100 bytes (16 or 32 byte changes are typical).
Right now the pattern is the following:
switch typecode {
case 1:
call method 1
case 2:
call method 2
default:
nil panic
}
I also tried the following (in the hope that it would be easier to
optimize), but it didn't really result in a code size reduction:
switch typecode {
case 1:
call method 1
case 2:
call method 2
case 0:
nil panic
default:
unreachable
}
Some code got smaller, while other code (the majority) got bigger. Maybe
this can be improved once range[1] is finally allowed[2] on function
parameters, but it'll probably take a while before that is implemented.
[1]: https://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#range-metadata
[2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/50156
This is a common case, but it also complicates the code. Removing this
special case does have a negative effect on code size in rare cases, but
I don't think it's worth keeping around (and possibly causing bugs) for
such uncommon cases.
This should not result in functional changes, although the output (as
stated above) sometimes changes a little bit.
