Calling conventions for K&R functions

Clang Frontend
1

I'm working on a Clang/LLVM backend for a DSP architecture and I'm a
little confused about calling conventions with callee functions declared
using K&R-style declarations in C.

Take this code, for example:

  int kr_callee(x) { return x; }
  int caller(int x) { return kr_callee(x); }

Clang (at least my aging one based on rev 108154) generates this LLVM IR
for it:

  target triple = "i686-pc-mingw32"

  define i32 @kr_callee(i32 %x) nounwind {
  entry:
    %x.addr = alloca i32, align 4 ; <i32*> [#uses=2]
    store i32 %x, i32* %x.addr
    %tmp = load i32* %x.addr ; <i32> [#uses=1]
    ret i32 %tmp
  }

  define i32 @caller(i32 %x) nounwind {
  entry:
    %x.addr = alloca i32, align 4 ; <i32*> [#uses=2]
    store i32 %x, i32* %x.addr
    %tmp = load i32* %x.addr ; <i32> [#uses=1]
    %call = call i32 (...)* bitcast (i32 (i32)* @kr_callee to i32
(...)*)(i32 %tmp) ; <i32> [#uses=1]
    ret i32 %call
  }

There seems to be a potential mismatch between the caller and the callee
here. The caller(), with its bitcast to i32(...)*, calls kr_callee()
with var-arg conventions. The definition of kr_callee() expects
fixed-arg conventions.

Is this intentional? Does a backend need to design its calling
conventions so that any fixed-arg function can be correctly called with
var-arg conventions?

-Ken

2

This is just how K&R C works. The platform ABI should be designed to make both work: the varargs and fixed arg convention should overlap. This is one of the reasons that ABI development is so tricky, and C is so evil :slight_smile:

If you don't do this, then code like this won't work (at least with -fno-builtin):

int main() { printf("hello world %f\n", 1.0); }

because there is no prototype for printf, so it gets a fully vararg prototype by default.

-Chris