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是否有任何语言/编译器使用具有非零嵌套级别的 x86 ENTER 指令?

Those familiar with x86 assembly programming are very used to the typical function prologue / epilogue:

push ebp ; Save old frame pointer.
mov  ebp, esp ; Point frame pointer to top-of-stack.
sub  esp, [size of local variables]
...
mov  esp, ebp ; Restore frame pointer and remove stack space for locals.
pop  ebp
ret

This same sequence of code can also be implemented with the ENTER and LEAVE instructions:

enter [size of local variables], 0
...
leave
ret

The ENTER instruction's second operand is the nesting level, which allows multiple parent frames to be accessed from the called function.

This is not used in C because there are no nested functions; local variables have only the scope of the function they're declared in. This construct does not exist (although sometimes I wish it did):

void func_a(void)
{
    int a1 = 7;

    void func_b(void)
    {
        printf("a1 = %d\n", a1);  /* a1 inherited from func_a() */
    }

    func_b();
}

Python however does have nested functions which behave this way:

def func_a():
    a1 = 7
    def func_b():
        print 'a1 = %d' % a1      # a1 inherited from func_a()
    func_b()

Of course Python code isn't translated directly to x86 machine code, and thus would be unable (unlikely?) to take advantage of this instruction.

Are there any languages which compile to x86 and provide nested functions? Are there compilers which will emit an ENTER instruction with a nonzero second operand?

Intel invested a nonzero amount of time/money into that nesting level operand, and basically I'm just curious if anyone uses it :-)

References:

Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual Vol 2: Instruction Set Reference

NASM Manual - ENTER: Create Stack Frame

+1, the most interesting question of today. For 1), GCC supports nested functions in C using exactly your syntax. But explicitly not in C++.
@IwillnotexistIdonotexist I coincidentally just ran across that same page. Interestingly it compiles on gcc 4.7.2 with the default options. Looking forward to looking at the disassembly. Fun stuff!
For what it is worth, I understand from grep-ing gcc-4.8.2/gcc/config/i386/i386.c:10339 that GCC simply never emits ENTER at all nowadays. And the comment at that line is quite clear: /* Note: AT&T enter does NOT have reversed args. Enter is probably slower on all targets. Also sdb doesn't like it. */
@IwillnotexistIdonotexist FWIW, that was part of the very first version of GCC. git log -p on their cvs->svn->git converted repository shows that it already existed in the initial check-in in 1992.
And my private svn checkout of LLVM 3.5 has at llvm/lib/Target/X86/X86FrameLowering.cpp:355 a comment for the emitPrologue() method which reads in part ; Spill general-purpose registers [for all callee-saved GPRs] pushq %<reg> [if not needs FP] .cfi_def_cfa_offset (offset from RETADDR) .seh_pushreg %<reg>. There are no mentions of ENTER, only pushes; And the enum constant for x86 ENTER occurs only 3 times in all of LLVM; It doesn't even look as though they have testcases for it.

C
Community

enter is avoided in practice as it performs quite poorly - see the answers at "enter" vs "push ebp; mov ebp, esp; sub esp, imm" and "leave" vs "mov esp, ebp; pop ebp". There are a bunch of x86 instructions that are obsolete but are still supported for backwards compatibility reasons - enter is one of those. (leave is OK though, and compilers are happy to emit it.)

Implementing nested functions in full generality as in Python is actually a considerably more interesting problem than simply selecting a few frame management instructions - search for 'closure conversion' and 'upwards/downwards funarg problem' and you'll find many interesting discussions.

Note that the x86 was originally designed as a Pascal machine, which is why there are instructions to support nested functions (enter, leave), the pascal calling convention in which the callee pops a known number of arguments from the stack (ret K), bounds checking (bound), and so on. Many of these operations are now obsolete.


+1 "Note that the x86 was originally designed as a Pascal machine" - I often wondered which high-level languages the designers had in mind when they added high-level language support instructions. Any additional historical perspective you could link to?
Have a look at stevemorse.org/8086 - Morse is the designer of the chip, and the chapters about Pascal and PL/M might be illuminating.
@JonathonReinhart once upon a time structured programming was the silver bullet and Pascal influenced languages like Modula and especially Ada which was "the language" of the United States Department of Defense. So hardware support of those languages does not surprise me
@AkiSuihkonen: -Os is not really "optimize for size" but rather "optimize for performance without performing any optimizations which are likely to adversely affect size".
Question about "Pascal Machine" and x86 retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/6959/8579
C
Community

As Iwillnotexist Idonotexist pointed out, GCC does support nested functions in C, using the exact syntax I've shown above.

However, it does not use ENTER instruction. Instead, variables which are used in nested functions are grouped together in the local variables area, and a pointer to this group is passed to the nested function. Interestingly, this "pointer to parent variables" is passed via a nonstandard mechanism: On x64 it is passed in r10, and on x86 (cdecl) it is passed in ecx, which is reserved for the this pointer in C++ (which doesn't support nested functions anyway).

#include <stdio.h>
void func_a(void)
{
    int a1 = 0x1001;
    int a2=2, a3=3, a4=4;
    int a5 = 0x1005;

    void func_b(int p1, int p2)
    {
        /* Use variables from func_a() */
        printf("a1=%d a5=%d\n", a1, a5);
    }
    func_b(1, 2);
}

int main(void)
{
    func_a();
    return 0;
}

Produces the following (snippet of) code when compiled for 64-bit:

00000000004004dc <func_b.2172>:
  4004dc:   push   rbp
  4004dd:   mov    rbp,rsp
  4004e0:   sub    rsp,0x10
  4004e4:   mov    DWORD PTR [rbp-0x4],edi
  4004e7:   mov    DWORD PTR [rbp-0x8],esi
  4004ea:   mov    rax,r10                    ; ptr to calling function "shared" vars
  4004ed:   mov    ecx,DWORD PTR [rax+0x4]
  4004f0:   mov    eax,DWORD PTR [rax]
  4004f2:   mov    edx,eax
  4004f4:   mov    esi,ecx
  4004f6:   mov    edi,0x400610
  4004fb:   mov    eax,0x0
  400500:   call   4003b0 <printf@plt>
  400505:   leave  
  400506:   ret    

0000000000400507 <func_a>:
  400507:   push   rbp
  400508:   mov    rbp,rsp
  40050b:   sub    rsp,0x20
  40050f:   mov    DWORD PTR [rbp-0x1c],0x1001
  400516:   mov    DWORD PTR [rbp-0x4],0x2
  40051d:   mov    DWORD PTR [rbp-0x8],0x3
  400524:   mov    DWORD PTR [rbp-0xc],0x4
  40052b:   mov    DWORD PTR [rbp-0x20],0x1005
  400532:   lea    rax,[rbp-0x20]              ; Pass a, b to the nested function
  400536:   mov    r10,rax                     ; in r10 !
  400539:   mov    esi,0x2
  40053e:   mov    edi,0x1
  400543:   call   4004dc <func_b.2172>
  400548:   leave  
  400549:   ret  

Output from objdump --no-show-raw-insn -d -Mintel

This would be equivalent to something more verbose like this:

struct func_a_ctx
{
    int a1, a5;
};

void func_b(struct func_a_ctx *ctx, int p1, int p2)
{
    /* Use variables from func_a() */
    printf("a1=%d a5=%d\n", ctx->a1, ctx->a5);
}

void func_a(void)
{
    int a2=2, a3=3, a4=4;
    struct func_a_ctx ctx = {
        .a1 = 0x1001,
        .a5 = 0x1005,
    };

    func_b(&ctx, 1, 2);
}

Interesting to see what gcc -O0 does. It's probably rare for gcc not to inline a nested function with optimization enabled. Although maybe if there are many call-sites in the outer function... (especially if you optimize for size with -Os.)
@Peter The other case would be where the inner function is passed as a callback to some external function. It is then that the closure-stub on the stack is really necessary, as a single function pointer cannot otherwise encapsulate both the function address and its data.
Oh right, I think I've seen gcc emit mov-immediate stores of x86 machine code for the stub you're talking about. And it emits assembler directives to mark the stack executable so this can work, so linking an object file that uses that will make your whole program's stack executable! lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2015-September/045063.html (no clang support yet)
Here's an example of gcc writing machine-code bytes to the stack before passing a function-pointer to a nested function (to a function it can't see): godbolt.org/g/NaSZWp.
Yep, that's exactly what I was referring to. Pretty cool stuff, really!
I
Ira Baxter

Our PARLANSE compiler (for fine-grain parallel programs on SMP x86) has lexical scoping.

PARLANSE tries to generate many, many small parallel grains of computation, and then multiplexes them on top of threads (1 per CPU). In fact, the stack frames are heap allocated; we didn't want to pay the price of a "big stack" for each grain since we have many, and we didn't want to put a limit on how deep anything could recurse. Because of parallel forks, the stack is actually a cactus stack.

Each procedure, on entry, builds a lexical display to enable access to surrounding lexical scopes. We considered using the ENTER instruction, but decided against it for two reasons:

As others have noted, it isn't particularly fast. MOV instructions do just as well.

We observed that the display is often sparse, and tends to be denser on the lexically deeper side. Most internal helper functions do fine with access only to their direct lexical parent; you don't always need access to all of your parents. Sometimes none.

Consequently, the compiler figures out exactly which lexical scopes a function needs access to, and generates, in the function prolog where ENTER would go, just the MOV instructions to copy the part of the parent's display that is actually needed. That often turns out to be 1 or 2 pairs of moves.

So we win twice on performance over using ENTER.

IMHO, ENTER is now one of those legacy CISC instructions, which seemed like a good idea at the time it was defined, but get outperformed by RISC instruction sequences that even Intel x86 optimizes.


This is the exact perspective I was hoping for; thank you. I'm still curious as to why AMD decided to keep ENTER in AMD64, even though it seems no one uses it.
@JonathonReinhart: Making the decoders reject it in 64-bit mode but accept it in other modes might have increased complexity. AMD were very conservative about cleaning up the instruction set, because they weren't sure AMD64 would catch on, and didn't want to be stuck with more transistors that nobody used. We can basically blame capitalism for this huge missed opportunity to tidy up x86 machine code and change things that make a high-performance implementation tricky. (e.g. setcc could have changed to setcc r/m32, saving instructions to booleanize into an int instead of char)
j
jakobengblom2

I did some instruction counting statistics on Linux boots using the Simics virtual platform, and found that ENTER was never used. However,there were quite a few LEAVE instructions in the mix. There was almost a 1-1 correlation between CALL and LEAVE. That would seem to corroborate the idea that ENTER is just slow and expensive, while LEAVE is pretty handy. This was measured on a 2.6-series kernel.

The same experiments on a 4.4-series and a 3.14-series kernel showed zero use of either LEAVE or ENTER. Presumably, the gcc code generation for the newer gccs used to compile these kernels has stopped emitting LEAVE (or the machine options are set differently).


-fomit-frame-pointer is the default now. gcc still uses leave when it makes frame pointers. (It does so even in optimized code for functions with a VLA: godbolt.org/g/LF3Rrk). I tested with a few different -mtune= options, and they all used leave. clang doesn't use leave, though, ever. That's a missed optimization for -Os (optimize for size), because it's only 3 uops vs. at least 2 for mov/pop (and maybe a stack-sync uop).
gcc and clang don't use enter even if you compile with -Os or -Oz. enter n,0 is 12 uops on Skylake, with 1 per 8 clocks throughput. On Ryzen, it's 12 uops with 1 per 16 clocks throughput. At -Oz: optimize for size at all costs, it might make sense for clang to use enter, because it does stuff like push 2 / pop rax to save 2 bytes vs. mov eax,2. (gcc doesn't have a -Oz mode.) See agner.org/optimize for instruction tables and a microarch guide to make sense of them. See also the SO x86 tag wiki
Thanks to @PeterCordes for the information. Fits what I see.
This does not answer the question. The question was not what Linux uses or what GCC emits, but whether languages exist that do use the instruction with a non-zero nesting level.

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