Steve Hildebrandt wrote on Mon, 23 Mar 2015:
As I see it there is no generall problem with my approach. While the location(paramgr), the interface(get_para_regoff) and the stored data(reg: Byte; off: LongInt) are worth some discussion, I think whatever kind of manager like approach will be taken, will turn out to be not realy different from what I already did.

procedure get_para_regoff(proccalloption: tproccalloption; paraloc: pcgparalocation; out reg: Byte; out off: LongInt);

Currently the default implementation does nothing but zero the reg and off.
This would be the place for a potential libffi implementation or any "generic" solution chosen.

The encoded information cannot be specific to a particular kind of consumer. The encoding format should be sufficiently generic to be able to represent the data required for all platforms, and to provide all the information required by any implementation that will use this information to call routines. The purpose of "manager" units is plug & play: you just add one to the uses clause of your main program, and it works. It cannot require compiling the entire FPC source tree and all used units with a particular command line option.

While leaving the possibility of specific corrections if need be by overriding get_para_regoff.

Maybe it is just me missing the bigger picture, so please correct me if I am wrong.

One example: on some PowerPC64 ABIs, if the last bytes of a record do not fill an entire (64 bit) register (e.g. because 5 bytes are left at the end), they must be passed in most significant bits of that register. In the compiler this is encoded as a "shift value" for that parameter. So you need to be able to encode these shift values in the RTTI.

Custom-encoding everything in a platform-specific way into these reg and offset fields (which then wouldn't have any relation to actual registers or offset values anymore in many cases) would lead to requiring platform-specific decoders in the RTL, which I very much would like to avoid.

I'm also not certain whether over time 255 registers will be enough if you also consider vector registers and all kinds of sub registers that are possible there (single precision scalar, double precision scalar, quad precision scaler (?), 32 bit vector (?), 64 bit vector, 128 bit vector, 256 bit vector -- all times the number of vector parameter registers).


Jonas
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