LLVM IR already includes the concept of structures so there isn’t much to do:

struct Foo
  size_t x;
  double y;

It is only a matter of discarding the actual field names and then index with numerals starting from zero:

%Foo = type {
    i64,       ; index 0 = x
    double     ; index 1 = y

Nested Structures

Nested structures are also straightforward. They compose in exactly the same way as a C/C++ struct.

struct FooBar
    Foo x;
    char* c;
    Foo* y;
%FooBar = type {
    %Foo,         ; index 0 = x
    i8*,          ; index 1 = c
    %Foo*         ; index 2 = y

Incomplete Structure Types

Incomplete types are very useful for hiding the details of what fields a given structure has. A well-designed C interface can be made so that no details of the structure are revealed to the client, so that the client cannot inspect or modify private members inside the structure:

void Bar(struct Foo *);


%Foo = type opaque
declare void @Bar(%Foo)

Accessing a Structure Member

As already told, structure members are referenced by index rather than by name in LLVM IR. And at no point do you need to, or should you, compute the offset of a given structure member yourself. The getelementptr (short GEP) instruction is available to compute a pointer to any structure member with no overhead (the getelementptr instruction is typically coascaled into the actual load or store instruction). The getelementptr instruction even has it’s own article over at the docs [1]. You can also find more information in the language reference manual [2].

So let’s assume we have the following C++ struct:

struct Foo
    int a;
    char *b;
    double c;

This maps pretty straight forward to the following LLVM type. The GEP indices are in the comments beside the subtypes.

%Foo = type {
    i32,        ; 0: a
    i8*,        ; 1: b
    double      ; 2: c

Now we allocate the object on the stack and access the member b, which is at index 1 and has type char* in C++.

Foo foo;
char **bptr = &foo.b;

First the object is allocated with the alloca instruction on the stack. To access the b member, the GEP instruction is used to compute a pointer to the memory location.

%foo = alloca %Foo
; char **bptr = &foo.b
%1 = getelementptr %Foo, %Foo* %foo, i32 0, i32 1

Now let’s see what happens if we create an array of Foo objects. Consider the following C++ snippet:

Foo bar[100];
bar[17].c = 0.0;

It will translate to roughly something like the following LLVM IR. First a pointer to 100 Foo objects is allocated. Then the GEP instruction is used to retrieve the second element of the 17th entry in the array. This is done within one GEP instruction:

; Foo bar[100]
%bar = alloca %Foo, i32 100
; bar[17].c = 0.0
%2 = getelementptr %Foo, %Foo* %bar, i32 17, i32 2
store double 0.0, double* %2

Note that newer versions of clang will produce code that directly uses the built-in support for Array types [3]. This explicitly associates the length of an array with the allocated object. GEP instructions can also have more than two indices to compute addresses deep inside nested objects.

%bar = alloca [100 x %Foo]
%p = getelementptr [100 x %Foo], [100 x %Foo]* %bar, i64 0, i64 17, i32 2
store double 0.000000e+00, double* %p, align 8

It is highly recommended to read the LLVM docs about the GEP instruction very thouroughly (see [1] [2]).

[1](1, 2) The Often Misunderstood GEP Instruction
[2](1, 2) LangRef: getelementptr Instruction
[3]LangRef: Array type