Extended Description

I installed VS 2019 and tried to self-host clang with the new headers, but it didn't work. The symptom was this:

[1 processes, 17/531 @ 3.4/s : 4.984s ] Building AttributesCompatFunc.inc...
FAILED: lib/IR/AttributesCompatFunc.inc
cmd.exe /C "cd /D C:\src\llvm-project\build && C:\src\llvm-project\build\bin\llvm-tblgen.exe -gen-attrs -I C:/src/llvm-project/llvm/lib/IR -I C:/src/llvm-project/llvm/include C:/src/llvm-project/llvm/lib/IR/AttributesCompatFunc.td -o lib/IR/AttributesCompatFunc.inc -d lib/IR/AttributesCompatFunc.inc.d"
llvm-tblgen.exe: Unknown command line argument '-gen-attrs'. Try: 'C:\src\llvm-project\build\bin\llvm-tblgen.exe -help'
llvm-tblgen.exe: Did you mean '-stats'?
ninja: build stopped: subcommand failed.

The issue here is that command line options aren't being registered. This is because TopLevelSubCommand is a ManagedStatic. What happens is that the cl::opt initializers run first, then ManagedStatic is incorrectly not linker initialized, we run the ManagedStatic ctor, and we zero out the pointer to the previously constructed list of command line flags.

The issue is that ManagedStaticBase wants to be linker initialized, but the way it achieves that is by not having a constructor at all. It has members that look like this:

class ManagedStaticBase {
protected:
// This should only be used as a static variable, which guarantees that this
// will be zero initialized.
mutable std::atomic<void *> Ptr;
mutable void (DeleterFn)(void);
mutable const ManagedStaticBase *Next;

With clang-cl, for some reason the default constructor for this class isn't considered to be constexpr. When I try to explicitly make it constexpr, clang complains:
C:\src\llvm-project\llvm\include\llvm/Support/ManagedStatic.h(47,3): error: defaulted definition of default constructor is not constexpr
constexpr ManagedStaticBase() = default;
^
1 error generated.

So, clang thinks the defaulted one won't be constexpr, but it doesn't say why. Even if it's correct, it should probably point the user at the uninitialized members. If I initialize the members explicitly like this:

mutable std::atomic<void *> Ptr{nullptr};
mutable void (DeleterFn)(void) = nullptr;
mutable const ManagedStaticBase *Next = nullptr;

Then the defaulted default ctor becomes constexpr and everything works as expected.

The atomic headers have some interesting ifdefs that seem to allude to this issue:

struct _Atomic_base : _Atomic_impl<_Bytes> {
...
#ifdef clang // TRANSITION, VSO#406237
constexpr _Atomic_base() _NOEXCEPT_COND(is_nothrow_default_constructible_v<_Ty>) : _My_val() {}
#else // ^^^ no workaround ^^^ // vvv workaround vvv
_Atomic_base() = default;
#endif // VSO#406237

The odd thing is that if this constexpr default ctor didn't exist, we might be in business? Hard to say.

Another way of looking at this bug, if it's a clang bug, is, why is the following an error?

struct atomic_ptr {
constexpr atomic_ptr() = default;
void *Ptr = nullptr;
};
struct Foo {
atomic_ptr Ptr;
int y;
constexpr Foo() = default; // why an error?
};
extern Foo obj;
Foo obj;

Just because 'y' has no initializer, Foo can't be constexpr, even if I ask for it to be?

In the end, I think this is a clang bug, but it might be an STL bug, so I added Billy and STL.

Anyway, there's an obvious workaround, which is to add a real constexpr constructor to ManagedStatic, assuming that works with all the toolchains we support. I'm going to try that.