[swift-dev] Returning more than two scalars from C code

[Bryan Chan]

Thanks for your responses so far. It took me a while to fully appreciate
what all this means.

I have read through John's mail thread on llvm-dev about adding the swiftcc
convention to LLVM/Clang. I don't think that discussion mentioned adding
Clang support for C++ functions returning aggregates in multiple registers
for targets that currently use sret, because, in John's words, "we don't
use the Swift CC to call C functions." But aren't these runtime functions
using TwoWordPair::Return doing exactly that?

On i386 and ARM, the TwoWordPair::Return type is masqueraded as a 64-bit
unsigned long long so that the returned values are passed in a register
pair. This trick is not portable, and infeasible on at least s390x.

A portable solution would be to implement such runtime functions in Swift,
and make them retrieve the needed results from two calls to C++, instead
of one call to a C++ function that returns a pair. The Swift function
can then return value pairs as usual. This seems much cleaner and simpler.

Bryan


rjmccall at apple.com wrote on 2016-03-22 03:51:52 PM:

> On Mar 22, 2016, at 12:25 PM, Joe Groff <jgroff at apple.com> wrote:
> > On Mar 22, 2016, at 12:06 PM, Bryan Chan <bryan.chan at ca.ibm.com> wrote:
> >
> > > jgroff at apple.com wrote on 2016-03-22 02:37:47 PM:
> > >
> > > > The runtime functions are hacked in various unsavory ways to give
> > > > them Swift-like calling conventions. Many of them also have
> > > > important semantics that the compiler needs to be aware of, so if
> > > > they aren't exported as standard library API in some way, you
really
> > > > shouldn't interact with them directly.
> > > > (swift_class_getInstanceExtents happens to be OK, but what are you
> > > > trying to do with it?)
> > >
> > > I am trying to build Swift on a different architecture (s390x). This
> > > function was causing crashes due to the ABI mismatch, and I also
> > > found that the issue is not 100% fixed on x86 either, so I wondered
> > > if the community has an opinion on the right way to deal with this
> > > in the runtime, or if the answer is simply "don't do this for
> > > 3-scalar returns".
> >
> > Yeah, there's no good way right now to return three scalars from
> > Clang. swift_class_getInstanceExtents and a few other runtime
> > entrypoints like allocBox and allocError use the
> > `TwoWordPair::Return` hack to use types that happen to return in two
> > registers on i386, x86_64, armv7, and arm64. If s390x's C ABI
> > doesn't define any such types, you might need to wait for proper
> > support for Swift calling conventions in Clang. I believe it's on
> > John McCall's near-term todo list to do that.
>
> To be clear, you'll still need to implement the swiftcc convention
> for your target in LLVM/clang, so it will still take some compiler
> implementation expertise to get right.  But at least the
> compatibility assumptions will be explicit.
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