Question

My colleague showed me the following macro from the LLVM source code:

#define IMPLEMENT_UNORDERED(TY, X,Y)                                         \
    if (TY->isFloatTy()) {                                                   \
        if (X.FloatVal != X.FloatVal || Y.FloatVal != Y.FloatVal) {          \
            return Dest;                                                     \
        }                                                                    \
    } else if (X.DoubleVal != X.DoubleVal || Y.DoubleVal != Y.DoubleVal) {   \
            Dest.IntVal = APInt(1,true);                                     \
            return Dest;                                                     \
}

Here’s how they use this macro:

static GenericValue executeFCMP_UEQ(GenericValue Src1, GenericValue Src2,
                                    Type *Ty) {
    GenericValue Dest;
    IMPLEMENT_UNORDERED(Ty, Src1, Src2)
    return executeFCMP_OEQ(Src1, Src2, Ty);
}

Below you can see the definition of GenericValue:

struct GenericValue {
    union {
        double          DoubleVal;
        float           FloatVal;
        PointerTy       PointerVal;
        struct { unsigned int first; unsigned int second; } UIntPairVal;
        unsigned char   Untyped[8];
    };
    APInt IntVal;   // also used for long doubles

    GenericValue() : DoubleVal(0.0), IntVal(1,0) {}
    explicit GenericValue(void *V) : PointerVal(V), IntVal(1,0) { }
};

My question is why there’s the following inequality test inside the macro:

X.FloatVal != X.FloatVal

Answer 1

I’d guess they test for NaN (not a number): if x has a NaN value, x != x yields true.