Staged Allocation: Engineering the Specification and Implementation of Procedure Calling Conventions

Construction of Systems Software Using Specifications of Procedure Calling Conventions

The procedure calling convention impacts the operation of many system software components. The interface between procedures, which is established by the calling convention, facilitates separate compilation of program modules and interoperability of programming languages. The procedure calling convention dictates the way that program values are communicated, and how machine resources are shared ...

A Formal Model and Specification Language for Procedure Calling Conventions 1

Procedure calling conventions are used to provide uniform procedure call interfaces. Applications, such as compilers and debug-gers, which generate, or process procedures at the machine-language abstraction level require knowledge of the calling convention. In this paper, we develop a formal model for procedure calling conventions called P-FSA's. Using this model, we are able to ensure several ...

Custom Calling Conventions in a Portable Assembly Language

Calling conventions are so difficult to implement and maintain that people rarely experiment with alternatives. The primary sources of difficulty appear to be parameter passing and stack-frame layout. To implement parameter passing, we use the automata developed by Bailey and Davidson, but we have developed a new specification language that is implementable directly in the compiler. To implemen...

A Formal Specification for Procedure Calling Conventions

Multithreading Languages

It is di cult to map the execution model of multithreading languages (languages which support ne-grain dynamic thread creation) onto the single stack execution model of C. Consequently, previous work on e cient multithreading uses elaborate frame formats and allocation strategy, with compilers customized for them. This paper presents an alternative cost-e ective implementation strategy for mult...