[swift-evolution] ABI in Layman's terms?

[John McCall]

> On Aug 11, 2016, at 1:52 AM, Jonathan Hull via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> Could someone explain in simple terms what the ABI is and what sorts of things might affect it?

The ABI for a compiled programming language is the set of rules for how all of its interoperating features are implemented in the compiled result.

For example, in Java the primary ABI is the JVM specification plus some common-sense rules about how language features are mapped to JVM features.  JVMs do not typically interoperate with other code at a direct binary level, and so the details of actual memory layout are not ABI.

Not all language features require interoperation, or only require it a certain kind of opaque interoperation.  For example:

  - Type aliases do not currently have any ABI impact because by design they are erased at compile time.  However, a complete reflection design might provide some mechanism for introspecting type-aliases at runtime, which would require information about type aliases to be present in the compiled output; the representation of that information would be ABI.

  - Closures in most programming languages do not allow external code to modify their captured values; only the closure's invocation function can access them, and that is generated together with the capturing code, so the exact methodology of performing a capture is not ABI.  However, arbitrary code can invoke the closure, and so the opaque representation of a closure value and the process for invoking it are ABI.

And so on.

John.

> I had thought it was the layout in memory of structs/classes/etc… and how the program knows where to go to find a particular field.  This seems to be incorrect though, as I have seen many features that I would assume have some affect on this layout ruled “out of scope for phase 1”.  For example, I would think that many generics features would have an impact on the ABI, or the idea of COW (via secret boxing) for structs, or even union types.
> 
> At the very least, I would think that mix-ins would have a fairly significant effect.
> 
> I am obviously missing something here, and I want to provide constructive effort to the community (as opposed to distracting from the task at hand), so I would appreciate some clarification/guidance...
> 
> Thanks,
> Jon
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