It's not really UB, I've seen games do things like this before. Basically, all data processing instructions can now act as branch instructions, simply by having their dest be PC. Bowser's Inside Story on the DS for example liked to use EOR to write to PC, as a form of encrypting their pointers.
Yeah I think AARCH64 special cases it? Not too familiar with their encoding or how they achieved it. My guess as to why is that it allows you to use more helpful registers (e.g. a zero register) in data processing instructions.
I think I can see your point though - from the perspective of ARMv4T's design, which was to be a simple yet effective CPU, making the PC a GPR does its job. Nowadays the standards are different, but I can see why it made sense at the time.
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It's not really UB, I've seen games do things like this before. Basically, all data processing instructions can now act as branch instructions, simply by having their dest be PC. Bowser's Inside Story on the DS for example liked to use EOR to write to PC, as a form of encrypting their pointers.
Yeah I think AARCH64 special cases it? Not too familiar with their encoding or how they achieved it. My guess as to why is that it allows you to use more helpful registers (e.g. a zero register) in data processing instructions.
I think I can see your point though - from the perspective of ARMv4T's design, which was to be a simple yet effective CPU, making the PC a GPR does its job. Nowadays the standards are different, but I can see why it made sense at the time.