Usage of type code with structs is outdated

Once upon a time in angr, I didn’t understand that there was a difference between the declaration of a struct (struct asdf) and a global typename for a structure (typedef struct asdf asdf;), because we all grow and learn things with time, and sometimes while designing a gigantically complicated system you mistake the trees for the forest.

Regardless, there’s some weird inconsistent behavior in angr.sim_type related to structure (and union, but nobody uses those) declarations. angr.sim_type.define_struct was up until yesterday a function which added to the global type namespace the typename of the struct (asdf) but not the struct asdf name. this is bad obviously!!! i just made it so it added both, but really it should just add struct asdf. I have no idea the extent to which people rely on this behavior, so deprecating it would be weird, except…

Really, define_struct should not exist at all. I think the only reason it existed was because I thought "oh well the point of simtypes is to make it so you can type state.mem[addr].type, and you can’t type types there that have spaces in their names, so what’s the point! anyway I later realized I could just add struct as a special keyword to the mem accessors, so now you can go state.mem[addr].struct.asdf, so there’s absolutely no need to have a big important function to import struct names as global typenames.

So, a to-do list:

• mark define_struct as deprecated
• fix the docs which tell you to use define_struct and add the state.mem[addr].struct.name syntax

[saullocarvalho]

I can do this, so you can focus on more important issues.

[rhelmot]

Good work. I’ll mark define_struct deprecated and update any examples using it.