After looking at v2-0006-jit-Reference-functions-by-name-in-IOCOERCE-steps.patch, I was wondering about other places in the code where we have const pointers to functions outside LLVM's purview: specially EEOP_FUNCEXPR* for any function call expressions, EEOP_DISTINCT and EEOP_NULLIF which involve operator specific comparison function call invocations, deserialization and trans functions for aggregates etc. All of the above cases involve to some degree some server functions that can be inlined/optimized.
If we do go down this road, the most immediate solution that comes to mind would be to populate referenced_functions[] with these. Also, we can replace all l_ptr_const() calls taking function addresses with calls to llvm_function_reference() (this is safe as it falls back to a l_pt_const() call). We could do the l_ptr_const() -> llvm_function_reference() even if we don't go down this road.
One con with the approach above would be bloating of llvmjit_types.bc but we would be introducing @declares instead of @defines in the IR...so I think that is fine.
Let me know your thoughts. I would like to submit a patch here in this thread or elsewhere.
