Comment by JonChesterfield
2 years ago
You should use all the input registers as output registers, unless your arch is doing some sliding window thing. The x64 proposal linked uses six to pass arguments in and three to return results. So returning six integers means three in registers, three on the stack, with three registers that were free to use containing nothing in particular.
The LLVM calling conventions for x86 only allow returning 3 integer registers, 4 vector registers, and 2 x87 floating point registers (er, stack slots technically because x87 is weird).
Sure. That would be an instance of the "usual error". The argument registers are usually caller save, where any unused ones get treated as scratch in the callee, in which case making them all available for returning data as well is zero cost.
There's no reason not to, other than C makes returning multiple things awkward and splitting a struct across multiple registers is slightly annoying for the compiler.
Limiting a newly designed Rust ABI to whatever LLVM happens to support at the moment seems unnecessarily limiting. Yeah, you'd need to write some C++ to implement it, but that's not the end of the world, especially compared to getting stuck with arbitrary limits in your ABI for the next decade or two.
This sort of thing is why integer division by 0 is UB in rust on targets where it's not UB, because it's UB in LLVM :)
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