Making wrappers of C handle types more atomic

A lot of handle types coming from C libs are declared as Void*, but this also has the effect of turning their wrapper classes non-atomic. Take LLVM::PassBuilderOptions as an example:

lib LibLLVM
  type PassBuilderOptionsRef = Void*

  fun create_pass_builder_options = LLVMCreatePassBuilderOptions : PassBuilderOptionsRef
  fun dispose_pass_builder_options = LLVMDisposePassBuilderOptions(options : PassBuilderOptionsRef)
end

# allocation calls `GC.malloc` rather than `.malloc_atomic`, because
# `@options` is an internal pointer
class LLVM::PassBuilderOptions
  def initialize
    @options = LibLLVM.create_pass_builder_options
    @disposed = false
  end

  def to_unsafe
    @options
  end

  def finalize
    return if @disposed
    @disposed = true

    LibLLVM.dispose_pass_builder_options(self)
  end
end

Given an unreachable LLVM::PassBuilderOptions object on the heap, Boehm GC will scan the object's contents, but not the contents referred by its @options variable, because it knows that the pointer doesn't belong to its own heap (we cannot pass the GC's allocator functions to LLVM). In some other C libraries, the Void* might not even physically refer to a (virtual) memory address, e.g. most LibC::HANDLEs. If we could guarantee this, we may as well use a regular integer type rather than Void*:

lib LibLLVM
  type PassBuilderOptionsRef = IntPtr
end

Since Crystal no longer sees any pointers inside LLVM::PassBuilderOptions's instance variables, LLVM::PassBuilderOptions will now use GC.malloc_atomic instead, and the GC won't scan the object contents at all.

A similar argument holds for struct wrappers:

lib LibLLVM
  type ValueRef = Void*
end

module LLVM::ValueMethods
  def initialize(@unwrap : LibLLVM::ValueRef)
  end
end

struct LLVM::Value
  include ValueMethods
end

An Array(LLVM::Value) maintains its buffer via Pointer(LLVM::Value).malloc. This uses non-atomic allocation because @unwrap is a pointer, but can be made atomic if LibLLVM::ValueRefValueRef becomes an IntPtr instead. Note that in this case LLVM manages the lifetimes of all LibLLVM::ValueRefs; there is no C API to dispose a value.

IntPtr may be obtained from LibC, or we could also expose it publicly.

crystal-lang / crystal

Making wrappers of C handle types more atomic #14107