Based on apps/handle.subx (commit 4894), but we're able to simplify it
further now that we know more about the situation we find ourselves in.
6 instructions, zero pushes or pops.
Before I can start building this, I need to reorganize my use of handles.
They're going to be fat pointers so we can't store them in registers anymore.
At the lowest level, SubX without syntax sugar uses names without prepositions.
For example, 01 and 03 are both called 'add', irrespective of source and
destination operand. Horizontal space is at a premium, and we rely on the
comments at the end of each line to fully describe what is happening.
Above that, however, we standardize on a slightly different naming convention
across:
a) SubX with syntax sugar,
b) Mu, and
c) the SubX code that the Mu compiler emits.
Conventions, in brief:
- by default, the source is on the left and destination on the right.
e.g. add %eax, 1/r32/ecx ("add eax to ecx")
- prepositions reverse the direction.
e.g. add-to %eax, 1/r32/ecx ("add ecx to eax")
subtract-from %eax, 1/r32/ecx ("subtract ecx from eax")
- by default, comparisons are left to right while 'compare<-' reverses.
Before, I was sometimes swapping args to make the operation more obvious,
but that would complicate the code-generation of the Mu compiler, and it's
nice to be able to read the output of the compiler just like hand-written
code.
One place where SubX differs from Mu: copy opcodes are called '<-' and
'->'. Hopefully that fits with the spirit of Mu rather than the letter
of the 'copy' and 'copy-to' instructions.
At the SubX level we have to put up with null-terminated kernel strings
for commandline args. But so far we haven't done much with them. Rather
than try to support them we'll just convert them transparently to standard
length-prefixed strings.
In the process I realized that it's not quite right to treat the combination
of argc and argv as an array of kernel strings. Argc counts the number
of elements, whereas the length of an array is usually denominated in bytes.
Maybe not quite. One final issue: length is denominated in bytes, which
is abstraction-busting and all, but dashed inconvenient.
Unfortunately x86 doesn't have a divide instruction that takes an immediate
:( So I'm not sure how to transparently perform the division without needing
some extra register.
I built this in 3 phases:
a) create a helper in the bootstrap VM to render the state of the stack.
b) interactively arrive at the right function (tools/stack_array.subx)
c) pull the final solution into the standard library (093stack_allocate.subx)
As the final layer says, this may not be the fastest approach for most
(or indeed any) Mu programs. Perhaps it's better on balance for the compiler
to just emit n/4 `push` instructions.
(I'm sure this solution can be optimized further.)
Kartik Agaram