[Tinycc-devel] Re : Disabling memmove optimization

[david . koch]

What you are requesting when "return b" is indeed a memory move (copy) 
operation.

Since your overriding the C language's memory operations, you have to provide 
your own.

It should be named either "memmove" or "_memmove" provided at link time.

Look for :

    "  -nostdinc    do not use standard system include paths\n"
    "  -nostdlib    do not link with standard crt and libraries\n"

That might be your dope.

https://tinycc-devel.nongnu.narkive.com/9qKgFxHl/nostdlib-option-in-libtcc

https://www.reddit.com/r/kernel/comments/iv9aey/gcc_nostdlib_vs_nolibc/

http://cs107e.github.io/guides/gcc/

Regards.

----- Mail d'origine -----
De: Raul Hernandez <raul.hernandez@spaceface.dev>
À: tinycc-devel@nongnu.org
Envoyé: Tue, 26 Apr 2022 11:04:02 +0200 (CEST)
Objet: [Tinycc-devel] Disabling memmove optimization

Hi, list, 

I’ve noticed that, in some cases, TCC will emit calls to standard library 
functions such as memmove.

For example, the following snippet:


struct Big { void *a, *b, *c; };

struct Big some_function(struct Big b) {
    return b;
}


… compiles to something like this (cleaned up for readability; the full 
assembled code can be seen on Godbolt: https://godbolt.org/z/d4nh7oh63 
<https://godbolt.org/z/d4nh7oh63>):

some_function:
    push   rbp
    mov    rbp, rsp
    sub    rsp, 0x10
(...)
    lea    rsi, [rbp+0x10]
    mov    rdi, QWORD PTR [rbp-0x10]
    mov    edx, 0x18
    mov    eax, 0x0
    call   memmove
    leave  
    ret    


I guess TCC does this as either an optimization (to take advantage of 
vectorization in the implementation of memmove), or as a way of simplifying the 
generated code.
My question is: is there any way of disabling this behavior? Ideally I’d wish 
to be able to disable it for a single function, but I’d be happy with a 
compiler flag when invoking TCC or a compile-time define when building it.

***

This probably sounds like the XY problem; the reason why I need to change that 
behavior is that I’m trying to write a closure implementation for the V 
programming language. It works similarly to the approach described in 
https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/01/08/ 
<https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/01/08/>, but I’m trying to write it in pure 
C for portability (so that it works with any calling convention and number of 
parameters). The implementation works correctly when compiled with GCC and 
clang, but sometimes fails under TCC because of the optimization I described. 
Any function calls within the closure wrapper will become invalid after the 
wrapper is copied somewhere else in memory, since the relative offset to that 
function will be different and the CPU will jump to a garbage location instead. 


Thank you,

Raul