Greetings! I'd like to port GCC's cc1 to the Functional C ABI. "Functional C" is what I call C minus the rule against returning pointers to automatic storage. I'd appreciate suggestions ranging from "it's been done" to "here's how" or even "you must abandon this idea". The FuncC ABI differs from all GCC-supported ABIs (to my knowledge) in one respect. All the others require "the stack pointer" on function return to have some relationship to its value on entry. Typically, they require it to equal is previous value, perhaps after "popping" the arguments. Functional C, in contrast, merely requires a valid stack on return, in no particular relationship to the caller's frame. Of course, this implies a need for a stack extension mechanism and garbage collection in long-running programs, but these problems have ready solutions. This resembles Henry Baker's so-called Cheney-on-the-M.T.A. model used successfully by Chicken Scheme. I consider it a "one-way" stack in that the stack pointer does not generally return to its starting position. [CheneyMTA ref: http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html] One-way stack code can call traditional, two-way code if it provides enough space; I'd use something like -fsplit-stack's probing implementation before each such call. To call back into one-way code seems a little trickier, and I am content to require the explicit use of a library for it. Having browsed the internals doc and i386 port, it occurs to me to start by marking ESP as an ordinary, call-clobbered register rather than a fixed register. I guess I'll need a fixed register to take its place, so I'd choose EBP, the traditional frame pointer. Then I'd try to express the new stack protocol: no more restoring ESP at the end of functions, but leave it pointing to "the stack" at calls and returns. As an optimization, I'd try to reclaim space when safe to do so, but in the general case, ESP moves only down. You'd see some form of jump instead of "ret", "mov" instead of "pop" in the output. Of course, I'd want to use tail calls whenever possible, so rather than the current PIC register mechanism, I'd consider requiring the callee's address to be in, say, ECX on entry. I've typed up a few more (tentative) details to optimize the calling convention for 32-bit x86. [ref: http://john-edwin-tobey.org/FuncC/funcc/funcc.txt] But the hardest part, I think, will be to make GCC accept a one-way stack. Thoughts? Suggestions? Readings? Good day! -John
