Re: [Tinycc-devel] Hello and a few questions about using libtcc

[Michael Matz]

Hello,

On Sun, 20 Dec 2020, Joshua Scholar wrote:

> > > 4) If I did something weird like have a call out from generated code to
> > my
> > > code, and my code returned on the same stack but in the context of a
> > > different thread than it entered from, would that break anything?
> >
> > No.  Or, perhaps better said, it would break in the same way when the
> > generated code would also be your code and not generated by TCC, i.e. TCC
> > doesn't introduce additional restrictions.  In particular the usual
> > makecontext/swapcontext way of implementing lightweight threads via stack
> > switching should work just fine, as should any more unusual way of
> > switching threads but not stack (what is that even supposed to mean?), as
> > long as the input code doesn't have any problem if it had been written
> > literally without TCC involvement.
> >
> > "switching threads but not stack (what is that even supposed to mean?)"
>
> What it means is this, imagine that a scheduler outside the generated code
> created a new stack, switched to it then called some generated code.
> And at some point that generated code rather than returning to the
> scheduler yielded by making a call into my own code which, instead of
> returning, just saved the context/continuation somewhere and switched back
> to its native stack.
>
> Then later on, a scheduler running on a different thread with a different
> thread local state, for instance, takes that stack and switches to it and
> returns into the generated code, appearing to
> return from the call, but in a different thread.

Yeah, so the classic makecontext stack switching/co-routines.  The above 
does switch stacks, which is why I was confused by your saying of not 
doing that.  Just mis-understanding.

> Any code that used thread local memory might break.

Yeah, and no, TCC is not doing any of that; the code it generates uses 
exactly the features that the input code uses as if it were compiled by a 
normal ahead-of-time C compiler.  So if your to-be-compiled source 
snippets are free of effects breaking the above use case then the code 
generated by TCC is free of them as well.

> I assume that tcc_compile_string is equivalent to tcc_add_file.  Does that
> mean that you can add multiple strings to be compiled?  Does tcc copy them,
> or does it compile them immediately and forget them, or do the original
> buffers have to be retained?

The string buffer doesn't have to be retained.  TCC generates machine code 
into the appropriate buffers, binds them to the host programs (or other 
parts of such machine code also added by tcc_compile_string) and that's 
it.

> Kyryl's answers brought up a bunch more questions for me.
>
> For instance, he said "tcc_delete will free everything, if you call it 
> before running generated code it will crash."
>
> So I wonder,
> 1) when is the run time library loaded, when is it initialized and is it
> ever freed or finalized?

Which run time library?  In a code snippet like
  "int foo(int a, int b) { return a + b; }"
there's nothing else involved than the assembly code containing basically 
some moves and an add and return instruction.  No runtime library 
involved.  There's a bit of runtime lib code in libtcc1.a which implements 
support for some things the compiler relies on that is better expressed 
with extra routines: some double-long arithmetics and va_list support, 
alloca, and the helpers for bounds-checking.  The code for that lies in 
libtcc1.a and is linked into the TCCState via tcc_add_runtime, called by 
tcc_relocate_ex in some cases.  This linking also places the resulting 
code in the provided buffers (or somewhere into TCCState).  It's deleted 
with tcc_delete, like the code from compile_string.


> If a jit made a different TCCState for each routine it compiles, say 1000
> routines,
>
> a) would tcclib load 1000 copies of the runtime library?

Yes.  Basically a TCCState is a complete sandbox separate from each other 
(not in a safety sense, but in design, if you have wild writes in on 
TCCState it might affect memory that happens to be for another TCCState), 
only communicating with the host executable (e.g. to provide a 'bar' 
routine for this snippet: "void callbar(void) { bar(); }").  But libtcc1.a 
is only loaded as necessary, so if your snippets don't use va_list and 
alloca (and you don't use bounds checking) then you don't need any of it 
on x86-64 for usual code (i.e. not one involving 128 bit arithmetics).

> b) would it make a static variable section for the runtime library 1000
> times and initialize the variables in it?

Yes.

> c) would it make a different heap for each routine?  If I call malloc in
> one routine and then free it in another routine would it try to free it
> into a different heap and corrupt a heap?

malloc and free aren't provided by TCC, they are provided by your host 
program (or rather by the supporting C library linked into it), the 
snippets, when calling malloc will use those routines.  So, if those are 
thread-safe (they are in all but the most basic C systems) then all is 
safe.  All TCCStates (and the routines therein) will use the same heap.

> d) if the jit wanted to update a routine with different code, so it called
> tcc_delete on that code's state, then made a new state and compiled new
> code for it, would that break anything?  Would tcc_delete finalize
> anything?  Delete a heap?

Nope.  Everything allocated (e.g. via malloc) by code snippets stays 
allocated after tcc_delete (probably then causing a leak as you also loose 
all data information, like where that malloced block was).  So you would 
need to make sure that all resources are freed in the snippets before 
calling tcc_delete, e.g. by providing a finalizer routine yourself (and 
calling it!).

About changes to an existing TCCState: it's quite probably that this 
currently doesn't work, I honestly don't know.  In particular such 
sequence:

   TCCState *s = tcc_new();
   tcc_compile_string(s, "...");
   tcc_relocate(s, ... buf ...)
   foo = tcc_get_symbol("foo");
   // do something with foo, up to here everything is clear
   // now comes the parts where I'm sure are bugs/unsupportedness:
   tcc_compile_string(s, " ... something else ..."); // uhh, changing a 
relocated state?
   tcc_relocate(s, ....); // finalize only new stuff ???
   foo2 = tcc_get_symbol("foo2");
   // do something with foo2
   ...
   tcc_delete(s);

Even if the above happens to work (i.e. two relocate calls, where the 
second would affect only the added snippets, or at least don't destroy 
the old snippets), which I doubt, then you certainly will run into 
problems when the second snippet tries to override symbol "foo" (from the 
first snippet) and expects that even old snippets calling old foo will 
then call new foo.

> ie., is tcclib really designed to be used the way a jit would use it?

Depends.  If you expect that the jit can regularly replace existing 
functions with new versions transparently, then no.  TCC could be extended 
to do so, but it's not there as of now.  At the very least there needs to 
be some way of unrolling the process of relocation and some symbol table 
trickery for the symbol replacements.

> He also said that it's possible to reuse a TCCState but "Yes you can reuse
> it, but it's not going to be efficient because it
> will have to recompile the previous stuff also."

Well, to get around the above problem of not being able to replace 
functions transparently you could use a scheme where you remember all 
strings fed into tcc_compile_string, with some meta-info (like this string 
was for function "foo", and order of addition).  Then, in order to replace 
function "foo" you would replace that string, and then feed all the 
collected string (all old ones, except the old-foo string, now replaced 
with new-foo) into a new TCCState.  You end up with a state equivalent to 
the old one, except for the replaced foo function.  Of course the 
addresses of stuff is all different, so you would have to refetch e.g. all 
symbols that you were fetching from the old state.

TCC is extremely fast in generating code, but the above process, 
especially if there's much non-changing code might be too slow in the end. 
You would have to try.

> 2 What state is remembered from one tcc_relocate to the next?
> a) does it remember that I
> called tcc_set_output_type,  tcc_add_library_path, tcc_add_symbol,
> tcc_add_file,
> or tcc_compile_string?  If it remembers tcc_compile_string, did it save a
> copy of the string?

As said above, calling tcc_relocate twice on the same state is probably 
not going to work right now, so the correct answer would be "mu".  But the 
info of output_type and added libraries would still be there.  The "info" 
(i.e. code/data/addresses) from added libs, files and symbols would still 
be there, but in a relocated/finalized fashion, in such way that 
relocating/finalizing it again would mangle it.  And no, compile_string 
doesn't remember it's argument anywhere.

> 3 And since he said I'd have to recompile the previous things, what
> happened to the previously compiled code?

Also mu.

> It sure would be cool if it turns out that libtcc loaded and initialized 
> its runtime library before any TCCState is made, and that runtime 
> library is shared between all states.  That would be what people who 
> make jits want. But I'm still worried by the answer that you can't run 
> code after a TCCState is deleted.

The runtime lib is really the smallest thing to worry about.  What's 
probably the bigger issue for you right now would be that a TCCState can 
be finalized only once safely.

It's actually probably not too much work to make TCCState into one where 
you can repeatedly call compile_string and relocate in a mixed way (and 
even override functions/data), it's just that noone invested the time to 
do that.


Ciao,
Michael.