[llvm-dev] [RFC] Introducing an explicit calling convention

[John Reagan via llvm-dev]

I would like more control too as we have explicit calling conventions
in our C front-end (and others too) and our Alpha/Itanium code
generator.  It is mostly used for non-standard argument linkages with
routines inside the OS that are written in VAX assembly code.  It
started life over 40 years ago as all assembly and we needed explicit
argument linkages to gradually replace the code with C.  We also use it
to describe passing structs into a sequence of registers.   These
linkages tend to be target-specific and surrounded by #if's for each of
our targets (Alpha and Itanium).  We have a different solution for x86
using LLVM partly due to not be easily able to specify the conventions
without doing exactly as proposed here (and not enough registers on x86-64).

I see no mention of floats other than Reid mentioning C99 complex.  The
x86-64 ABI gets really ugly with packing a struct with a mixture of ints
and floats.  I'm not sure how one would describe the default mechanism
with the proposed attributes

FYI

Here's the syntax for our C pragma, but it helps describe the underlying
implementation:

#pragma linkage linkage-name=(characteristics)

where 'characteristics' is a parenthesized list of comma-separated items
of the following forms:

parameters (register-list)
result (simple-register-list)
preserved (simple-register-list)
nopreserve (simple-register-list)
notused (simple-register-list)
standard_linkage

Simple-register-list is a comma-separated list of register names.

Register-list (used by 'parameters') can have parenthesized sublists

For example

#pragma linkage sample_linkage = (parameters ((r5, r6, r7), f6))
#pragma use_linkage sample_linkage(sub)
void sub (struct sample_struct_t p1, double p2) { }






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