Hal Finkel 57ec3b5488 Clarify the description of the noalias attribute
The previous description of the noalias attribute did not accurately specify
the implemented semantics, and the terminology used differed unnecessarily
from that used by the C specification to define the semantics of restrict. For
the argument attribute, the semantics can be precisely specified in terms of
objects accessed through pointers based on the arguments, and this is now what
is done.

Saying that the semantics are 'slightly weaker' than that provided by C99
restrict is not really useful without further elaboration, so that has been
removed from the sentence.

noalias on a return value is really used to mean that the function is
malloc-like (and, in fact, we use this attribute to represent
__attribute__((malloc)) in Clang), and this is a stronger guarantee than that
provided by restrict (because it is a property of the pointed-to memory region,
not just a guarantee on object access). Clarifying this is relevant to fixing
(and was motivated by the discussion on) PR21556.

git-svn-id: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk@222497 91177308-0d34-0410-b5e6-96231b3b80d8
2014-11-21 02:22:46 +00:00
..
2014-09-18 21:54:02 +00:00
2014-09-10 20:43:03 +00:00
2014-07-28 22:10:52 +00:00
2014-10-16 20:00:02 +00:00
2014-09-05 04:56:43 +00:00

LLVM Documentation
==================

LLVM's documentation is written in reStructuredText, a lightweight
plaintext markup language (file extension `.rst`). While the
reStructuredText documentation should be quite readable in source form, it
is mostly meant to be processed by the Sphinx documentation generation
system to create HTML pages which are hosted on <http://llvm.org/docs/> and
updated after every commit. Manpage output is also supported, see below.

If you instead would like to generate and view the HTML locally, install
Sphinx <http://sphinx-doc.org/> and then do:

    cd docs/
    make -f Makefile.sphinx
    $BROWSER _build/html/index.html

The mapping between reStructuredText files and generated documentation is
`docs/Foo.rst` <-> `_build/html/Foo.html` <-> `http://llvm.org/docs/Foo.html`.

If you are interested in writing new documentation, you will want to read
`SphinxQuickstartTemplate.rst` which will get you writing documentation
very fast and includes examples of the most important reStructuredText
markup syntax.

Manpage Output
===============

Building the manpages is similar to building the HTML documentation. The
primary difference is to use the `man` makefile target, instead of the
default (which is `html`). Sphinx then produces the man pages in the
directory `_build/man/`.

    cd docs/
    make -f Makefile.sphinx man
    man -l _build/man/FileCheck.1

The correspondence between .rst files and man pages is
`docs/CommandGuide/Foo.rst` <-> `_build/man/Foo.1`.
These .rst files are also included during HTML generation so they are also
viewable online (as noted above) at e.g.
`http://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/Foo.html`.

Checking links
==============

The reachibility of external links in the documentation can be checked by
running:

    cd docs/
    make -f Makefile.sphinx linkcheck