[LLVMdev] Proposing a new 'alloca' parameter attribute to implement the Microsoft C++ ABI

[Reid Kleckner]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Duncan Sands <baldrick at free.fr> wrote:

> On 29/07/13 15:30, Anton Korobeynikov wrote:
>
>> object in place on the stack or at least call its copy constructor.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> what does GCC do?
>>>
>> Nothing. It does not support MSVC ABI.
>>
>
> Maybe we shouldn't either :)  So the ABI requires the struct to be pushed
> on the
> stack by the caller along with the other parameters, and what's more it
> requires
> the caller to execute some code on that copy, in place on the stack, before
> performing the call.  Is that right?
>

Just calling the copy ctor is the bare minimum needed to support the ABI.
 cl.exe uses a more efficient lowering that evaluates the arguments right
to left directly into the outgoing argument stack slots.  It lowers
following call to bar to something like:

struct A {int x; int y;};
A foo();
void bar(int, A, int);
...
bar(0xdead, foo(), 0xbeef);

x86_32 pseudo intel asm:

push 0xdead
sub esp, 8
push esp  # sret arg for foo
call foo
add esp, 4 # clear sret arg
push 0xbeef
call bar
add 16 # clear args

With the current proposal, LLVM would generate code that adjusts the stack
once to begin the call, and once more to end it.  Initially, it would do a
blind SP restore, but that can be optimized to a constant SP adjustment.
 Arguments will still be evaluated left to right and will be stored into
the special alloca outgoing argument slots.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20130729/5192a787/attachment.html>