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Static inline functions can sometimes serve as an optimisation barrier to compilers. Its very annoying. I've run into a lot of cases when targeting C as a compilation target where swapping something out into an always-inline function results in worse code generation, because compilers have bugs sadly

There's also the issue in that the following two things don't have the same semantics in C:

    float v = a * b + c;

    static_inline float get_thing(float a, float b) {
        return a*b;
    }

    float v = get_thing(a, b) + c;

uintptr_t's don't actually have the same semantics as pointers either. Eg if you write:

    void my_func(strong_type1* a, strong_type2* b);

    void my_func(some_type_that_has_a_uintptr_t1 ap, some_type_that_has_a_uintptr_t2 bp) {
        float* a = get(ap);
        float* b = get(bp);
    }

The inline function receives the operands as arguments, and so whatever they are, they get converted to float. Thus the inline code is effectively like this:

  float v = (float) ((float) a) * ((float) b) + c;

  float v = ((float) a) * ((float) b) + c;

> Now, if a and b are already float, then it's equivalent.

Not necessarily! Floating-point contraction is allowable essentially within statements but not across them. By assigning the result of a * b into a value, you prohibit contraction from being able to contract with the addition into an FMA.

In practice, every compiler has fast-math flags which says stuff it and allows all of these optimizations to occur across statements and even across inline boundaries.

(Then there's also the issue of FLT_EVAL_METHOD, another area where what the standard says and what compilers actually do are fairly diametrically opposed.)

The first mention of contraction in the standard (I'm looking at N3220 draft that I have handy) is:

A floating expression may be contracted, that is, evaluated as though it were a single opera- tion, thereby omitting rounding errors implied by the source code and the expression evalua- tion method.86) The FP_CONTRACT pragma in <math.h> provides a way to disallow contracted expressions. Otherwise, whether and how expressions are contracted is implementation-defined.

If you're making a language that generates C, it's probably a good idea to pin down which C compilers are supported, and control the options passed to them. Then you can more or less maintain the upper hand on issues like this.

It seems to me that either you want to allow for contraction everywhere, or not all. Allowing it only sometimes is worst of both worlds.

If you allow contraction after inlining, whether or not an FMA will get contracted becomes subject to the vicissitudes of inlining and other compiler decisions that can be hard-to-predict. It turns out to be a lot harder of a problem to solve than it appears at first glance.

Compiler bugs and standards warts suck, but you know what sucks more? Workarounds for compiler bugs and edge cases that become pessimizing folk wisdom that we can dispell only after decades, if ever. It took about that long to convince the old guards of various projects that we could have inline functions instead of macros. I don't want to spook them into renewed skepticism.

Maybe they just checked with a compiler and got the same code?

I think I may end up coming full circle on Virgil. Circa 2005 Virgil I compiled to C and then with avr-gcc to AVR. I did that because who the heck wants to write an AVR backend? Circa 2009 I wrote a whole new compiler for Virgil III and since then it has JVM, x86, x86-64, wasm, wasm-gc and (incomplete) arm64.

I like compiler backends, but truth be told, I grow weary of compiler backends.

I have considered generating LLVM IR but it's too quirky and unstable. Given the Virgil wasm backend already has a shadow stack, it should now be possible for me to go back to square one and generate C code, but manage roots on the stack for a precise GC.

Hmm....

FWIW I think the LLVM bitcode format has stronger compatibility guarantees than the text IR. But I agree it's a bit of a pain either way; plus, if you forgo linking to the library and just rely on whatever 'llc' the user has installed, figuring out bugs is not a fun time...

Having done this for a dozen of experiments/toys I fully agree with most of the post, would be nice if the the addition of must_tail attribute could be reliable across the big 3 compilers, but it's not something that can be relied on (luckily Clang seems to be fairly reliable on Windows these days).

2 additional points,

1: The article mentions DWARF, even without it you can use #line directives to give line-numbers in your generated code (and this goes a very long way when debugging), the other part is local variables and their contents.

For variables one can get a good distance by using a C++ subset(a subset that doesn't affect compile time, so avoid any std:: namespaced includes) instead and f.ex. "root/gc/smart" ptr's,etc (depending on language semantics), since the variables will show up in a debugger when you have your #line directives (so "sane" name mangling of output variables is needed).

2: The real sore point of C as a backend is GC, the best GC's are intertwined with the regular stack-frame so normal stack-walking routines also gives everything needed for accuracte GC (required for any moving GC designs, even if more naive generation collectors are possible without it).

Now if you want accurate somewhat fast portable stack-scanning the most sane way currently is to maintain a shadow-stack, where you pass prev-frame ptrs in calls and the prev-frame ptr is a ptr to the end of a flat array that is pre-pended by a magic ptr and the previous prev-frame ptr (forming a linked list with the cost of a few writes, one extra argument with no cleanup cost).

Sadly, the performant linked shadow-stack will obfuscate all your pointers for debugging since they need to be clumped into one array instead of multiple named variables (and restricts you from on-stack complex objects).

Hopefully, one can use the new C++ reflection support for shadow-stacks without breaking compile times, but that's another story.

> ... [pointers] need to be clumped into one array ...

You could put each stack frame into a struct, and have the first field be a pointer to a const static stack-map data structure or function that enumerates the pointers within the frame.

BTW, the passed pointer to this struct could also be used to implement access to the calling function's variables, for when you have nested functions and closures.

Related to shadow stacks, I've had trouble convincing the C optimizer that no one else is aliasing my heap-allocated helper stacks. Supposedly there ought to be a way to tell it using restrict annotations, but those are quite fiddly: only work for function parameters, and can be dusmissed for many reasons. Does anyone know of a compiler that successfully used restrict pointers in their generated code? I'd love to be pointed towards something that works.

Note that declaring no aliasing is probably unsafe for concurrent or moving garbage collectors, as then the C compiler can conveniently "forget" to either store or load values to the shadow stack at some points...

(though it is fine if GC can only happen inside a function call and the call takes the shadow stack as an argument)

I wonder what Zig would be like as an ILR. Easy cross compilation, plus, you can compile with runtime checks to help debug your compiler output. Might be fun for a sideproject

> And finally, source-level debugging is gnarly. You would like to be able to embed DWARF information corresponding to the code you residualize; I don’t know how to do that when generating C.

I think emitting something like

    #line 12 "source.wasm"

If you have ever used something like yacc/bison, debugging it is relatively sane with gdb.

You can find all the possible tricks in making it debuggable by reading the y.tab.c

Including all the corner cases for odd compilers.

Re2c is a bit more modern if you don't need all the history of yacc.

Debugging Yacc is completely insane with gdb, for other reasons, like that grammar rules aren't functions you can just put a breakpoint on, and see their backtrace, etc, as you can with a recursive descent parser.

But yes, you can put a line-oriented breakpoint on your action code and step through it.

Nim compiles to C, and it has a compiler iotion that does this.

Generators don't have to put out portable code. You document what compilers are required for the output and that's something you can change with any given release of your generator. Then the generated code uses whatever works with those compilers. If you use the output with some other compiler, then that's undefined behavior w.r.t. the documentation of the generator; you are on your own. "Whatever works" could be something undocumented that works de facto.

I’ve done something similar during my intern days as well. We had a Haskell-based C AST library that supports the subset of C we generate, and an accompanying pretty printing library for generating C code that has good formatting by default. It really was a reasonable approach for good high-level abstraction power and good optimizations.

Love how he put a paragraph for someone asking, "why not generate Rust?". Beautiful.

The lifetimes argument is extremely sound: this is information which you need from the developer, and not something that is easy to get when generating from a language which does not itself have lifetimes. It's an especially bad fit for the GC case he describes.

> not something that is easy to get when generating from a language which does not itself have lifetimes

Not easy, but there are compilers that do it.

Lobster [0] started out with automatic reference counting. It has inferred static typing, specialising functions based on type, reminiscent of how Javascript JIT compilers do it. Then the type inference engine was expanded to also specialise functions based on ownership/borrowing type of its arguments. RC is still done for variables that don't fit into the ownership system but the executed ops overall got greatly reduced. The trade-off is increased code size.

I have read a few older papers about eliding reference counting ops which seem to be resulting in similar elisions, except that those had not been expressed in terms of ownership/borrowing.

I think newer versions of the Swift compiler too infer lifetimes to some extent.

When emitting Rust you could now also use reference counting smart pointers, even with cycle detection [1]. Personally I'm interested in how ownership information could be used to optimise tracing GC.

[0]:https://aardappel.github.io/lobster/memory_management.html

[1]:https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Breadth-first-Cycle-Co...

I was also reading through lobsters Memory management, which (i think) currently implements "borrow first" semantics, to do away with a lot of run-time reference counting logic, which i think is a very practical approach. Also i have doubts if reference counting overhead ever becomes too much for some languages to never consider RC ?

Tangentially, i was experimenting with a runtime library to expose such "borrow-first" semantics, such "lents" can be easily copied on a new thread stack to access shared memory, and are not involved in RC . Race-conditions detection helps to share memory without any explicit move to a new thread. It seems to work well for simpler data-structures like sequence/vectors/strings/dictionary, but have not figured a proper way to handle recursive/dynamic data-structures!

If I were targeting Rust for compilation, I wouldn't do lifetimes, instead everything would be unsafe Rust using raw pointers.

I'd have to do an actual project to see how annoying it is to lower semantics to unsafe Rust to know for sure, but my guess is you'd be slightly better off because you don't have to work around implicit conversions in C, the more gratuitous UBs in C, and I think I'd prefer the slightly more complete intrinsic support in Rust over C.

I mean, the argument boils down to "the language I'm compiling FROM doesn't have the same safeguards as rust". So obviously, the fault lies there. If he'd just compile FROM rust, he could then compile TO rust without running into those limitations. A rust-to-rust compiler (written in rust) would surely be ideal.

I'd be willing to sell you a rust to rust compiler. In fact, I'll even generalize it to do all sorts of other languages too at no extra charge. I just need a good name...maybe rsync?

Snark aside, the output targets of compilers need to be unsafe languages typically, since the point of a high level compiler in general is to verify difficult proofs, then emit constructs consistent with those proof results, but simplified so that they cannot be verified anymore, but can run fast since those proofs aren't needed at runtime anymore. (Incidentally this is both a strength and weakness of C, since it provides very little ability for the compiler to do proofs, the output is generally close to the input, while other languages typically have much more useful compilers since they do much more proof work at compile time to make runtime faster, while C just makes the programmer specify exactly what must be done, and leaves the proof of correctness up to the programmer)

Compilers named after animals are the the most popular, so I might suggest cat?

<something something about having a hammer and seeing nails everywhere> :)

Has anyone defined a strict subset of C to be used as target for compilers? Or ideally a more regular and simpler language, as writing a C compiler itself is fraught with pitfalls.

Not precisely, but C-- (hard to search for!) was a C-like (or C subset?) intermediate language for compilers to generate.

I found this Reddit thread that gives a bit more detail:

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1pbbon/c_as_a_proj...

and the project link:

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/

Sounds like why LLVM was created? (and derivatives like MLIR and NaCL) Its IR is intended be be C-like, except that everything is well-defined and substantially more expressive than C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-- for example?

I think one could also use a subset compatible with a formal semantics of C. Maybe the C semantics in K Framework, CompCert C, or C0 from Verisoft. Alternatively, whatever is supported in open-source, verification tooling.

Then, we have both a precise semantics and tools to help produce robust output.

For portability, hopefully C89 as well?

What language features would make C better as a target language for compilers?

Not strictly for compilers (which probably don't need to use macros much), but for normal macro-codegen it would be very useful to have some some way to add line returns in macro-generated code so that it's easier to inspect with gcc -E

I've thought of doing that, but it's too much fun writing an optimizer and code generator!

(My experience with "compile to C" is with cfront, the original C++ implementation that compiled to C. The generated code was just terrible to read.)

Last I checked static inline was merely a hint that compilers need not take. They all do, but by definition it's not a zero cost abstraction.

> it could be that you end up compiling a function with, like 30 arguments, or 30 return values; I don’t trust a C compiler to reliably shuffle between different stack argument needs at tail calls to or from such a function.

Yet you trust it to generate the frame for this leviathan in the first place. Sometimes C is about writing quality code, apparently, sometimes it's about spending all day trying to outsmart the compiler rather than take advantage of it.

This is weird. As soon as I thought about the subject the relevant article showed up on HN.

I was thinking about how to embed custom high level language into my backend application written in C++. Each individual script would compile to native shared lib loadable on demand so that the performance stays high. For this I was contemplating exactly this approach. Compile this high level custom language with very limited feature set to plain C and then have compiler that comes with Linux finish the job.

What’s your use case for this?

I’ve done a few such things for compiling ML models, but in the end I always regretted it.

Java JIT compilers perform function inlining across virtual function boundaries… this is why JIT’d Java can outperform the same C or C++ code. Couple it with escape analysis to transfer short-lived allocations to be stack-allocated (avoiding GC).

Often times virtual functions are implemented in C to provide an interface (such as filesystem code in the Linux kernel) via function pointers—-just like C++ vtable lookups, these cannot be inlined at compile time.

What I wonder is whether code generated in C can be JIT-optimized by WASM runtimes with similar automatic inlining.

"static inline", the best way of getting people doing bindings in other languages to dislike your library (macros are just as bad, FWIW).

I really wish someone on the C language/compiler/linker level took a real look at the problem and actually tried to solve it in a way that isn't a pain to deal with for people that integrate with the code.

If it's not in the .h file it's supposed to be a private function.

you can access it using extern from anywhere:

    // a.c
    int f( int x ) {
        return x + 1;
    }

    // b.c
    extern int f(int x );

    int main() {
        int y = f(41);
    }

I don't see what you're getting at with respect to writing bindings.

The whole point of using "static" in that way is to prevent people from using it outside of the file.

If you need to call a static function (inline or otherwise) from outside of the compilation unit to use the API, then it's a bug in the API, not a problem with static.

I agree with you about pre-processor macros, though.

"private function" doesn't mean "you can't know about this", it means "you shouldn't rely on this as a stable interface to my code".

Just because you can use the information you have to call a given function, doesn't mean you aren't violating an interface.

my point was that f() had been defined static then you can't access it from outside the translation unit it is defined in - in other words, it is "private". i'm afraid i'm unclear what your point is.