Re: [Chicken-hackers] "argvector" chicken (was: ABI woes)

[John Cowan]

Scripsit address@hidden:

> The new approach passes all arguments in a stack-allocated C_word array.

I would expect this to deeply suck on systems that have lots of registers
and whose C compilers routinely pass arguments in registers.  In particular,

> not significantly slower

is pretty surprising on x86_64, where the first six arguments are passed in
registers, since registers are usually much faster than main memory, and the
cache doesn't help much with these argvectors unless they are shared between
call sites (which you imply they currently are not).

So this should be checked not only on i386 architectures, where you'd expect it
to be fine, but also on ARM32 and PPC architectures.  I note that SPARC Solaris
no longer has an apply-hack; I don't know if it's still supported.

So anyone who depends on those architectures, or even has the capability
of testing them, should test this and speak up.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        address@hidden
He made the Legislature meet at one-horse tank-towns out in the alfalfa
belt, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders
would stay home and let him go to work and do things as he pleased.
    --H.L. Mencken's translation of the Declaration of Independence