[haskell-llvm] [Haskell-cafe] LLVM, type-level?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2010, Lally Singh wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Henning Thielemann
> <lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 7 Dec 2010, Lally Singh wrote:
>>
>>> Hey all,
>>>
>>>  I'm generating a structure definition from input, and would like to
>>> generate some LLVM code that can use it.  I see an 'alloca' function
>>> in LLVM.Core that may do the trick, but takes a static type (Ptr a),
>>> which I wouldn't have.  Is there a dynamic variant?  I'm currently
>>> generating a TypeDesc Struct type.
>>
>>  How much flexibility do you need? Is the user really allowed to specify an
>> arbitrary 'struct' declaration? This could be a security hole.
>>  If you really want it, I think you would have to use existential
>> quantification in order to construct a user defined type at runtime.
>
> Could you elaborate on this a bit more?  Or is there an example
> somewhere I could look at?

Converting a value to a type is possible with the (continuation 
passing) trick you have already seen in withString. You can look into 
reifyIntegral in order to get an idea:
   http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/type-level/0.2.4/doc/html/src/Data-TypeLevel-Num-Sets.html#reifyIntegral
  (It even does not require existentially quantified data constructors, but 
uses functions with all quantification directly.)