Zephyr Calling Convention Language (CCL)

Coping with Calling Conventions

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Introduction

ASDL

CCL

vpo

What & Why?

Procedure calling conventions are used to provide uniform procedure-call interfaces. Tools like compilers and debuggers, which work with procedures at the machine-language level, need to know the calling convention. This paper develops a formal model for procedure calling conventions: P-FSA's. Using this model, we are able to ensure a number of completeness and consistency properties of calling conventions.

Most tools deal with calling conventions in an ad-hoc manner. The code is complicated, difficult to maintain, and often riddled with errors. We introduce a calling convention specification language, called CCL. Parts of tools can be generated from CCL descriptions. CCL and P-FSA's enable accurate specification of conventions that can be shown to be both consistent and complete.

CCL and P-FSA's are described in a POPL paper (344K).

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