I am designing TTL serial computer, and I am struggling on choosing architecture more suitable for LLVM compiler backend (I want to be able to run any C++ software there). There will be no MMU, no multiplication/division, no hardware stack, no interrupts.
I have 2 main options:
1) 8-bit memory, 8-bit ALU, 8-bit registers (~12-16). Memory address width 24 bit. So I will need to use 3 registers as IP and 3 registers for any memory location.
Needless to say that any address calculations would be pure pain to implement in compiler.
2) 24-bit memory, 24-bit ALU, 24-bit registers (~6-8). Flat memory, nice. The drawbacks is that due to serial nature of the design, each operation would take 3 time more clocks, even if we are operating on some booleans. 24-bit memory data width is expensive. And it's harder to implement in hardware in general.
The question is : Do you think implementing all c++ features on this 8-bit, stack-less based hardware is possible, or I need to have more complex hardware to have generated code of reasonable quality & speed?
I second the suggestion to use LCC. I used it in this homebrew 16-bit RISC project: http://fpgacpu.org/xsoc/cc.html .
I don't think it should make much difference whether you build the 8-bit variant and use 3 add-with-carries to increment IP, or the 24-bit variant and do the whole thing in hardware. You can hide the difference in your assembler.
If you look at my article above, or an even simpler CPU here: http://fpgacpu.org/papers/soc-gr0040-paper.pdf you will see you really don't need that many operators / instructions to cover the integer C repetoire. In fact there is an lcc utility (ops) to print the min operator set for a given machine.
For more information see my article on porting lcc to a new machine here: http://www.fpgacpu.org/usenet/lcc.html
Once I had ported lcc, I wrote an assembler, and it synthesized a larger repetoire of instructions from the basic ones. For example, my machine had load-byte-unsigned but not load-byte-signed, so I emitted this sequence:
lbs rd,imm(rs) ->
lbu rd,imm(rs)
lea r1,0x80
xor rd,r1
sub rd,r1
So I think you can get by with this min cover of operations:
registers
load register with constant
load rd = *rs
store *rs1 = rs2
+ - (w/ w/o carry) // actually can to + with - and ^
>> 1 // << 1 is just +
& ^ // (synthesize ~ from ^, | from & and ^)
jump-and-link rd,rs // rd = pc, pc = rs
skip-z/nz/n/nn rs // skip next insn on rs==0, !=0, <0, >=0
Even simpler is to have no registers (or equivalently blur registers with memory -- all registers have a memory address).
Set aside a register for SP, and write the function prolog/epilog handler in the compiler and you won't have to worry about stack instructions. There's just code to store each of the callee save registers, adjust the SP by the frame size, and so forth.
Interrupts (and return from interrupts) are straightforward. All you need to do is force a jump-and-link instruction into the instruction register. If you chose the bit pattern for that to be something like 0, and put the right addresses into the source register rs (especially if it is r0), it can be done with a flip-flop reset input or an extra force-to-0 and gate. I use a similar trick in the second paper above.
Interesting project. I see a TTL / 7400 contest is underway and I was thinking myself of how simple a machine could you get away with and would it be cheating to add a 32 KB or 128 KB async SRAM to the machine to hold the code and data.
Anyway, happy hacking!
p.s.
1) You will want to decide how large each integral type is. You can certainly make char, short, int, long, long long, etc. the same size, one 24b word, if you wish, although it won't be compliant in min representation ranges.
2) And although I focused on lcc here, you were asking about C++. I recommend persuing C first. Once you have things figured out for C, including *, /, % operators in software, etc., it should be more tractable to move to full blown C++ whether in LLVM or GCC. The difference between C and C++ is "only" the extra vtables and RTTI tables and code sequences (entirely built up out the primitive C integer operator repetoire) required to handle virtual function calls, pointer to member dereference, dynamic casts, static constructors, exception handling, etc.
IMHO, It is possible for c compiler. i am not sure for c++, though.
LLVM/CLang could be hard choice for 8bit computer,
Instead, first try lcc, then second llvm/etc, HTH.
Bill Buzbee succeed to retarget lcc compiler for his Magic-1(known as homebrewcpu).
Although the hardware design and construction of Magic-1 usually gets the most attention, the largest part of the project (by far) has been developing/porting the software. To this end, I've had to write an assembler and linker from scratch, retarget a C compiler, write and port the standard C libraries, write a simplified operating system and then port a more sophisticated one. It's been a challenge, but a fun one. I suppose I'm somewhat twisted, but I happen to enjoy debugging difficult problems. And, when the bug you're trying to track down could involve one or more of: hardware design flaw, loose or broken wire, loose or bad TTL chip, assembler bug, linker bug, compiler bug, C runtime library bug, or finally a bug in the program in question there's lot of opportunity for fun. Oh, and I also don't have the luxury of blaming the bugs on anyone else.
I'm continually amazed that the damn thing runs at all, much less runs as well as it does.
In my opinion, stackless hardware is already poorly suited for C and C++ code. If you have nested function calls, you will need to emulate a stack in software anyway, which of course is much slower.
When going the stackless route, you will probably allocate most of your variables as 'static', and have no re-entrant functions. In this case, 6502-style addressing modes can be effective. You could for example have these addressing modes:
Immediate address (24bit) as part of opcode
Immediate address (24bit) plus index register (8bit)
Indirect access: immediate 24bit address to memory, which contains the actual address
Indirect access: 24 bit address to memory, 8 bit index register added to value from memory.
The address modes outlined above would allow efficient access to arrays, structures and objects allocated at a constant address (static allocation). They would be less efficient (but still usable) for dynamically and stack-allocated objects.
You would also get some benefit from your serial design: usually the 24 bit + 8 bit addition does not take 24 cycles, but you can instead short-circuit the addition when carry is 0.
Instead of mapping the IP as registers directly, you could allow changing it only through goto/branch instructions, using the same address modes as above. Jumps into dynamically computed addresses are quite rare so it makes more sense to give the whole 24-bit address directly in the opcode.
I think that if you design the CPU carefully, you can use many C++ features quite efficiently. However, do not expect that any random C++ code would run fast on such a limited CPU.
The implementation is certainly possible, but I doubt it will be usable (at lest for C++ code). As it was already noted, first problem is lack of stack. Next, bunch of C++ relies heavily on dynamic memory allocation, also C++ "internal" structures are quite big.
So, as it seems to me, it will be better, if you:
Get rid of C++ requirement (or at least, limit yourself to some subset)
Use 24 bits, not 8 bits for everything (for registers as well)
Add hardware stack
You are not going to be able to run "any" C++ code there. For example fork(), system(), etc. Anything that clearly relies on interrupts for example. You can get a long way there, sure.
Now do you mean any programs that can/have been written in C++ or are you limiting yourself to the language only and not the libraries that are commonly associated with C/C++? The language itself is a much easier rule to live with.
I think the easier question/answer, is, why not just try? What have you tried so far? It could be argued that the x86 is an 8-bit machine, no regard for alignment and many 8 bit instructions. the msp430 was ported to llvm to show how easily and quickly it could be done, I would like to see that platform with better support (not where my strengths lie otherwise I would be doing it) a 16 bit platform. no mmu. does have a stack and interrupts sure, dont have to use them and if you remove library rules then what is left that needs an interrupt?
I would look at llvm but note that the documentation produced that shows how easy it is to port, is dated and wrong and you basically have to figure it out on your own from the compiler sources. llc has a book, known for that, not optimized. Sources dont compile well on modern computers, always having to go backwards in time to use it, any time I go near it after an evening just trying to build it as is I give up. vbcc, simple, clean, documented, not unfriendly to smaller processors. Is it C++, dont remember. Of all of them the easiest to get a compiler up and running though. Of all of them LLVM is the most attractive and most useful when all said and done. dont go near gcc or even think of it, duct tape and bailing wire inside holding it together.
Have you invented your instruction set yet? do you have a simulator and assembler yet? Look up lsasim at github to find my instruction set. You can write an llvm backend for mine as practice for yours...grin...(my vbcc backend is horrible, I need to start over)...
You have to have some idea of how the high level will be implemented but you really have to start with an instruction set and an instruction set simulator and an assembler of some sort. Then start hand converting C/C++ code into assembly for your instruction set, that should pretty quickly get you through "can I do this without a stack", etc. In this process define your calling convention, implement more C/C++ code by hand using your calling convention. THEN dig into a compiler and make a back end. I think you should consider vbcc as a stepping stone, then head for LLVM if it appears like it (the isa) will work.
Related
I understand that JVM and CLR were designed as stack-based virtual machines. When JIT compiles bytecode into native code, does it also translate stack primitives (load/store) to registers on X86 platform?
If yes, it looks like whether bytecode is stack-based or register-based doesn't really matter. JIT matters.
I think that you are confusing two different concepts.
At least for Java, the JVM acts as a virtual machine - it's an idealized computing machine with a comparatively high-level assembly language (the bytecode) that is based on a call stack with stack frames. When compiling Java into bytecode, the Java program is turned into (essentially) an assembly program for controlling this machine.
When actually running Java on a given system, the job of the JVM implementation is to faithfully simulate the execution of this stack-based machine using whatever hardware is actually available. This typically means that a huge number of stack operations would be implemented using registers when possible, and perhaps using other specialized hardware that isn't present in the description of the Java virtual machine. The actual details of how this is done is implementation-specific - some implementations might compile it down to machine code that does almost everything in registers, while a simpler implementation might just compile down to in-memory operations. I worked for a few months on a JavaScript implementation of the JVM, in which case we "compiled" the code down to JS functions, which were in turn handed off to the browser's JS implementation.
The reason for this distinction is that Java was designed to be easily downloaded and embedded (think applets). In this case, security and portability are important concerns. The bytecode had to have some way to be inspected automatically to rule out certain types of malicious code (buffer overruns, for example). Similarly, whatever format was used had to be sufficiently high-level that it could be run on a variety of different platforms (handheld devices, supercomputers, PCs, etc.) The choice of the stack-based JVM made both of these concerns possible to satisfy simultaneously. It's high-level enough that it's possible to inspect the bytecode to rule out many type errors or reads/writes of uninitialized memory, while sufficiently low-level that a JVM can use tricks like compiling down to code using registers.
If you are curious what your particular JVM will do to a specific piece of code, you should take a look at the documentation. Most JVMs have some way of giving you information about how they're executing the code. If your question is "why not just have bytecode do register-based manipulation," the reason is twofold:
There is an analog of registers in bytecode - each stack frame has some extra dedicated space for temporary values to be stored, and
There isn't as robust support for registers as is present in x86 or MIPS because the JVM code had to be easy to execute on multiple pieces of hardware, and hardcoding in a number of registers might complicate things.
Hope this helps!
It is impossible to not use registers on an x86 core. The processor doesn't have an instruction to, say, add two local variables. One of them has to be loaded in a register. Then you can add the value in the register to the value in a variable. And store the result back to a stack variable.
The optimization opportunities are obvious from this sequence. Like not storing it back but keeping the result in a register and using it later, saving both the store and the load. That's the job of the optimizer, it looks for ways to make the best use of the available registers.
The only way to know for sure would be to examine JIT compiled output, but it's quite safe to say that using registers is one of the JIT compiler's lamest optimizations. I believe most programmers would be hard pressed to write faster code than the JIT compiler does.
The JIT compiler is capable of a lot, and probably uses registers as much as is appropriate. Things like method inlining encourage the use of registers, and a lot of imperative program code can be expressed more simply on a register-based architecture, so it only makes sense for the JIT compiler to use registers.
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How can programming in assembly help in achieving optimization
The most likely way programming in assembly can improve your code is by improving you: teaching you more about what is happening at a low level and getting the discipline of optimization can help you make good decisions in higher-level languages.
As far as actually helping one program: as others have noted it's rarely worth it. It's just possible you can use it as a kind of advanced profile-driven optimization: try many variations until you find one that's best on your particular problem.
To start with this: write a program in C or C++ or whatever compiled language you normally use, fire up your debugger, and disassemble a small but nontrivial function, and have a think about why the compiler did what it did. Then try writing a small bit of inline assembler yourself. On modern systems assembly is mostly easily embedded within C rather than done from scratch.
Or alternatively, get a teeny machine like a PIC and make it flash a LED...
These days, you have to be very good at assembly to beat the compiler.
I can do it any day of the week, but only by viewing the compiler's output first.
And then, if it gains more than a couple of percentage points I'd be surprised.
These days, I only program in assembly when I'm doing something the compiler can't do.
In principle, you can write highly-optimized code in assembly because the compiler is limited to specific, general-purpose optimizations that should apply to many programs, while you can be creative and use your knowledge of this particular program.
To take a simple example, back when I was new to this business compilers were very limited in their ability to optimize register usage. You know that to perform any sort of arithmetic or logical operation, the CPU must generally load one of the values into a register, then perform the operation on the other, then save the result? Like to add two numbers together -- and I'll use a pseudo-assembler here because I don't know what assembly languages you know and I've forgotten most of the details myself -- you'd write something like this:
LOAD A,value1
ADD A,value2
STORE a,destination
Compilers used to generate the loads for every operation. So if your C program said:
x=x+y;
z=z+x;
The compiler would generate something like:
LOAD A,x
ADD A,y
STORE A,x
LOAD A,z
ADD A,x
STORE A,z
But a human could observe that by the time we get to the second statement, register A already contains x, and addition is commutative, so we could optimize this to:
LOAD A,x
ADD A,y
STORE A,x
ADD A,z
STORE A,z
Et cetera. One could go through all sorts of tiny micro-optimizations like this. I used to do that all the time back when I was young and the world was green.
But over the years compilers have gotten much smarter, and CPUs have gotten more powerful so the micro-optimizations don't matter as much.
Thus, I haven't written any assembly language code in, wow, probably 15 years. I used to read the assembly generated by the compiler when debugging, sometimes it would give a clue to a subtle problem, but I haven't done that in years now either.
I don't think compilers are even written in assembly any more. Instead, you write the first draft of the compiler in a high level language on some other computer, i.e. you write a cross-compiler to get yourself off the ground.
I suspect the only real use of assembly today is for extremely constrained environments, embedded systems and that sort of thing; and for programs that have to deal intimately with the hardware, like device drivers.
I'd be interested to hear if there are any assembly programmers on this forum who care to tell us why they assembly programmers.
Programming in assembly won't, in and of itself, optimize your code. The main thing about assembly is that it allows you to have very low-level access and to choose exactly what instructions the processor executes.
Since you won't have some compiler generating the assembly for you, you can perform code optimizations when you write the program yourself, if you know how.
So, you think you are smarter than gcc optimizing compiler?
If not, then fughed aboud it (learning assembly for the sake of getting better at optimization). That would be akin to learning Scheme language for the sake of getting better at recursion :)
In general, the compiler will do a fairly good job at generating optimal code. There are, however, cases where writing your own assembly can result in even more optimized (in terms of space and/or speed) code.
Typically, this happens when there is something that you know about the target system that the compiler doesn't. Compilers are designed to work on a variety of systems; if you want to take advantage of something unique to your target system, sometimes you have to go in and do it yourself. Here's an example. A few months ago, I was writing some code for a MIPS-based embedded system. There are many different types of MIPS CPUs, and some support certain opcodes that others do not. My compiler would generate MIPS code using the set of assembly operations that all MIPS architectures support. However, I knew that my chip could do more. I had a subroutine that needed to count the number of leading zeroes in a 32-bit number. The compiler synthesized this into a loop that took about 10 lines of assembly to do. I re-wrote it in one line by using the CLZ opcode that was designed to do just this. I knew that my chip supported the opcode but the compiler didn't. Admittedly, situations like this aren't very common; when they do pop up, however, it's nice to have enough of a background in assembly to take advantage of them.
Sometimes one will need to perform a task which maps particularly well onto some CPU instructions, but does not fit well into any high-level-language constructs. For example, on many processors one may easily perform extended-precision arithmetic using something like:
add r0,r4
addc r1,r5
addc r2,r6
addc r3,r7
This will regard r3:r2:r1:r0 and r7:r6:r5:r4 as numbers four words long, adding the second to the first. Four nice easy instructions, any anyone who understands assembly would know what they do. I know of no way to perform the same task in C without it not only generating bigger and slower object code, but also being an incomprehensible mess of source code.
A somewhat more extreme but specialized real-world example: Given two arrays array1[0..63] and array2[0..63], compute array1[0]*array2[0] + array1[1]*array2[1] + array1[2]*array2[2] ... + array1[63]*array2[63]. On a DSP I used, the computation could be done in machine code in about 75 machine cycles (about 67 of which are a repeating MAC instruction). There's no way C code could come anywhere close.
About the only time I can think of using Assembly language for optimizing code is when you need something very specific, like you need a GPIO on a microcontroller to toggle between high and low exactly every 9 clock cycles. that's too short a time to manage with an interrupt, and higher level language compilers don't normally offer this kind of control over the instruction stream.
Typically you wouldn't program in assembly. You would program in C, and then look at the generated assembly to see what optimzations (or not) the C compiler made automatically. Adjusting your C code (to allow for better vectorization for example) will allow the compiler to re-arrange code better, which will give you optimized assembly
More likely than being able to beat the compiler at writing assembly code. Knowing how typical tasks translate to assembly may help you write better high level language code.
Typically you do not resort to assembly for optimiziation purposes. If this is possible, usually someone already will have provided the essential code ready for you to call, for example in form of a linear algebra library.
Likewise assembly offers direct access to the processor (e.g. for atomicity, time measurement, I/O) but the important accesses will already have have been made accessible for your high level language.
Compilers do a good job of generating assembler.
However, there's a bad reason why hand-written assembler is faster. Since it's harder to write, you write less of it.
It would be nice if programmers could discipline themselves to get the same job done in minimal code, regardless of language.
When writing assembly, or even just straight raw bytes the assembler outputs, you can write programs that use computer hardware specific features or makes something otherwise very carefully specified.
There might be really high benefits if your program does the optimized part far more often than it does anything else. Always set up benchmarks before attempting optimizations.
The downcome is that your hand-written assembly works on fewer different hardware. It may even end up getting limited into the hardware model and revision!
It's rare you ever can or need to write assembly routines because commonly written software must work on almost every hardware you find and your kitten.
There's one interesting application if you know assembly. You can then write programs that produce assembly routines. Though it's mostly only fun unless you keep it really small so you can port it easily.
Read the Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash
In most modern applications, it can't to any significant degree.
Inter-Process Communication Affects Application Response Time explains why algorithms are unlikely to be bottlenecks. (But always profile - never guess.)
In general, programming in assembly will increase time-to-market, bug density, and maintenance costs. Instead, strive for simplicity and readability in your code.
As poolie mentioned, the main benefit of learning assembly today is a deeper understanding of software and hardware. From that perspective, there's quite a bit of information on Steve Gibson's site.
If you understood why there is sometimes the need to do asm, you would appreciate the strengths, costs (headaches for you).
I like a lot of what I've read about D.
Unified Documentation (That would
make my job a lot easier.)
Testing capability built in to the
language.
Debug code support in the language.
Forward Declarations. (I always
thought it was stupid to declare the
same function twice.)
Built in features to replace the
Preprocessor.
Modules
Typedef used for proper type checking
instead of aliasing.
Nested functions. (Cough PASCAL
Cough)
In and Out Parameters. (How obvious is that!)
Supports low level programming -
Embedded systems, oh yeah!
However:
Can D support an embedded system that
not going to be running an OS?
Does the outright declearation that
it doesn't support 16 bit processors
proclude it entirely from embedded
applications running on such machines? Sometimes you don't need a hammer to solve your problem.
Garbage collection is great on Windows or Linux, but, and unfortunately embedded applications sometime must do explicit memory management.
Array bounds checking, you love it, you hate it. Great for design assurance, but not alway permissable for performance issues.
What are the implications on an embedded system, not running an OS, for multithreading support? We have a customer that doesn't even like interrupts. Much less OS/multithreading.
Is there a D-Lite for embedded systems?
So basically is D suitable for embedded systems with only a few megabytes (sometimes less than a magabyte), not running an OS, where max memory usage must be known at compile time (Per requirements.) and possibly on something smaller than a 32 bit processor?
I'm very interested in some of the features, but I get the impression it's aimed at desktop application developers.
What is specifically that makes it unsuitable for a 16-bit implementation? (Assuming the 16 bit architecture could address sufficient amounts of memory to hold the runtimes, either in flash memory or RAM.) 32 bit values could still be calculated, albeit slower than 16 bit and requiring more operations, using library code.
I have to say that the short answer to this question is "No".
If your machines are 16 bit, you'll have big problems fitting D into it - it is explicitly not designed for it.
D is not a light languages in itself, it generates a lot of runtime type info that normally is linked into your app, and that also is needed for typesafe variadics (and thus the standard formatting features be it Tango or Phobos). This means that even the smallest applications are surprisingly large in size, and may thus disqualify D from the systems with low RAM. Also D with a runtime as a shared lib (which could alleviate some of these issues), has been little tested.
All current D libraries requires a C standard library below it, and thus typically also an OS, so even that works against using D. However, there do exist experimental kernels in D, so it is not impossible per se. There just wouldn't be any libraries for it, as of today.
I would personally like to see you succeed, but doubt that it will be easy work.
First and foremost read larsivi's answer. He's worked on the D runtime and knows of what he's talking about.
I just wanted to add: Some of what you asked about is already possible. It won't get you all the way, and a miss is as good as a mile here but still, FYI:
Garbage collection is great on Windoze or Linux, but, and unfortunately embedded apps sometime must do explicite memory management.
You can turn garbage collection off. The various experimental D OSes out there do it. See the std.gc module, in particular std.gc.disable. Note also that you do not need to allocate memory with new: you can use malloc and free. Even arrays can be allocated with it, you just need to attach a D array around the allocated memory using a slice.
Array bounds checking, you love it, you hate it. Great for design assurance, but not alway permissable for performance issues.
The specification for arrays specifically requires that compilers allow for bounds checking to be turned off (see the "Implementation Note"). gdc provides -fno-bounds-check, and in dmd using -release should disable it.
What are the implications on an embedded system, not running an OS, for multithreading support? We have a customer that doesn't even like interrupts. Much less OS/multithreading.
This I'm less clear on, but given that most C runtimes allow turning off multithreading, it seems likely one could get the D runtime to disable it as well. Whether that's easy or possible right now though I can't tell you.
The answers to this question are outdated:
Can D support an embedded system that not going to be running an OS?
D can be cross-compiled for ARM Linux and for ARM Cortex-M. Some projects aim at creating libraries for Cortex-M architectures like MiniLibD for the STM32 or this project which uses a generic library for the STM32. (You could implement your own minimalistic OS in D on ARM Cortex-M.)
Does the outright declearation that it doesn't support 16 bit processors proclude it entirely from embedded applications running on such machines? Sometimes you don't need a hammer to solve your problem.
No, see answer above... (But I would not expect that "smaller" architectures than Cortex-M will be supported in the near future.)
Garbage collection is great on Windows or Linux, but, and unfortunately embedded applications sometime must do explicit memory management.
You can write Garbage Collection free code. (The D foundation seems to aim at a "GC free compliant" standard library Phobos but that is work in progress.)
Array bounds checking, you love it, you hate it. Great for design assurance, but not alway permissable for performance issues.
(As you said this depends on your "personal taste" and design decisions. But I would assume an acceptable performance overhead for bound checking due to the background of the D compiler developers and D's design aims.)
What are the implications on an embedded system, not running an OS, for multithreading support? We have a customer that doesn't even like interrupts. Much less OS/multithreading.
(What is the question? One could implement mutlithreading using D's language capabilities e.g. like explained in this question. BTW: If you want to use interrupts consider this "hello world" project for a Cortex-M3.)
Is there a D-Lite for embedded systems?
The SafeD subset of D targets at the embedded domain.
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Is there any real use for self modifying code?
I know that they can be used to build worms/viruses, but I was wondering whether there is some good reason that a programmer may have to use self modifying code.
Any ideas? Hypothetical situations are welcome too.
Turns out that the Wikipedia entry on "self-modifying code" has a great list:
Semi-automatic optimization of a state dependent loop.
Runtime code generation, or specialization of an algorithm in
runtime or loadtime (which is popular,
for example, in the domain of
real-time graphics) such as a general
sort utility preparing code to perform
the key comparison described in a
specific invocation.
Altering of inlined state of an object, or simulating the high-level
construction of closures.
Patching of subroutine address calling, as done usually at load time
of dynamic libraries, or, on each
invocation patching the subroutine's
internal references to its parameters
so as to use their actual addresses.
Whether this is regarded as
'self-modifying code' or not is a case
of terminology.
Evolutionary computing systems such as genetic programming.
Hiding of code to prevent reverse engineering, as through use of a
disassembler or debugger.
Hiding of code to evade detection by virus/spyware scanning software and
the like.
Filling 100% of memory (in some architectures) with a rolling pattern
of repeating opcodes, to erase all
programs and data, or to burn-in
hardware.
Compression of code to be decompressed and executed at runtime,
e.g., when memory or disk space is
limited.
Some very limited instruction sets leave no option but to use
self-modifying code to achieve certain
functionality. For example, a "One
Instruction Set Computer" machine that
uses only the
subtract-and-branch-if-negative
"instruction" cannot do an indirect
copy (something like the equivalent of
"*a = **b" in the C programming
language) without using self-modifying
code.
Altering instructions for fault-tolerance
On the point about thwarting hackers using self-modifying code:
Over the course of several firmware updates, DirectTV slowly assembled a program on their smart card to destroy cards that have been hacked to illegally receive unpaid channels. See Jeff's Coding Horror article on the Black Sunday Hack for more information.
I've seen self-modifying code used for:
speed optimisation, by having the program write more code for itself on the fly
obsfucation, to make reverse engineering much harder
In former times where RAM was limited, self modifying code was used to save memory. Nowadays for example application compression utilities like UPX are used to decompress/modify the own code after loading a compressed image of the application.
Because the Commodore 64 doesn't have many registers and has a 1Mhz processor. When you need to read a memory address offset by a value it is easier to modify the source.
#Reader:
LDA $C000
STA $D020
INC Reader+1
JMP Reader
That's the last time I wrote self-modifying code anyway :-)
Artificial Intelligence?
Because it's really really cool, and sometimes that's reason enough.
1960s-era assembly languages used self-modifying code to implement function calls without a stack.
Knuth, v1, 1ed p.182:
MAX100 STJ EXIT ;Subroutine linkage
ENT3 100 ;M1. Initialize
JMP 2F
1H CMPA X,3 ;M3. Compare
JGE *+3
2H ENT2 0,3 ;M4. Change m
LDA X,3 ;(New maximum found)
DEC3 1 ;M5. Decrease k
J3P 1B ;M2. All tested?
EXIT JMP * ;Return to main program
In a larger program containing this coding as a subroutine, the single instruction "JMP MAX100" would cause register A to be set to the current maximum value of locations X + 1 through X + 100, and the position of the maximum would appear in rI2. Subroutine linkage in this case is achieved by the instructions "MAX100 STJ EXIT" and, later, "EXIT JMP *". Because of the way the J-register operates, the exit instruction will then jump to the location following the place where the original reference to MAX100 was made.
Edit: It may be hard to see what's going on, even with the brief explanation here. In the line MAX100 STJ EXIT, MAX100 is a label for the instruction (and thus for the procedure as a whole), STJ means STORE the jump register (where we just came from), EXIT means the memory location labeled 'EXIT' is the target of the STORE. EXIT, we see later is the label for the last instruction. So it's overwriting code! But, many instructions (including STJ here) implicitly overwrite only the operand portion of the instruction word. So the JMP remains untouched, and the * is a dummy token, since there's really nothing meaningful to put there, it'd only get overwritten.
Self-modifying code is also used where register-indirect addressing is not available, and yet the address you need is sitting right there in the register. PDP-1 LISP:
dap .+1 ;deposit address part of accumulator in (IP+1)
lac xy ;load accumulator with (ADDRESS) [xy is a dummy symbol, just like * above]
These two instructions perform ACC := (ACC) by modifying the operand of the load instruction.
Modifications like these are relatively safe, and on antique architectures, they are necessary.
Lots of reasons. Off the top of my head:
Runtime class construction and meta programming. For example, having a class factory that takes a connection to an SQL table and generates a client class specialized for that table (with accessors for the columns, find methods, etc.).
Then of course there's the famous bitblt example, and the regexp analogs.
Dynamically optimizing based on RT information a la tracing JITs
Subtype specialization of ada style generic functions in an accretive environment.
-- MarkusQ
Dynamic linking is a kind of self-modification (patching absolute and/or relative jump locations) ... that's normally done by the O/S's program loader, though.
Neural networks are kind of self-modifying code.
Then there are evolutionary algorithms which modify themselves.
Mike Abrash described the Pixomatic code generator for Dr. Dobb's Journal a while back: http://www.ddj.com/architect/184405807 . That's a software 3d dx7(?) compatible rasterizer.
LOL - i've written self-modifying code on two occasions:
when first learning assembly language, before i understood indirect indexed access
accidentally, as pointer bugs in assembly language and C
i can imagine that there may be scenarios where self-modifying code would be more efficient than alternatives, but nothing obvious leaps to mind. In general, this is something to avoid - debugging nightmare, etc. - unless you are deliberately trying to obfuscate as mentioned above.
Applications which implement their own scripting languages often do this. For example, database servers often compile stored procedures (or queries) this way.
Dynamic code generation in SwiftShader is a form of self modifying code that enables it to efficiently implement Direct3D 9 on the CPU.
Modern example:
I have a script that needs JWT token to work. To request a token interactive login is needed or use a refresh token that is issued with new JWT token. Would be nice to store refresh token in the script and update it each time it is being executed
I have highly optimized piece of C++ and making even small changes in places far from hot spots can hit performance as much as 20%. After deeper investigation it turned out to be (probably) slightly different registers used in hot spots.
I can control inlineing with always_inline attribute, but can I control register allocation?
If you really want to mess with the register alloation then you can force GCC to allocate local and global variables in certain registers.
You do this with a special variable declaration like this:
register int test_integer asm ("EBX");
Works for other architectures as well, just replace EBX with a target specific register name.
For more info on this I suggest you take a look at the gcc documentation:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.3.3/gcc/Local-Reg-Vars.html
My suggestion however is not to mess with the register allocation unless you have very good reasons for it. If you allocate some registers yourself the allocator has less registers to work with and you may end up with a code that is worse than the code you started with.
If your function is that performance critical that you get 20% performance differences between compiles it may be a good idea to write that thing in inline-assembler.
EDIT: As strager pointed out the compiler is not forced to use the register for the variable. It's only forced to use the register if the variable is used at all. E.g. if the variable it does not survive an optimization pass it won't be used. Also the register can be used for other variables as well.
In general the register keyword is simply ignored by all modern compilers. The only exception is the (relatively) recent addition of an error if you attempt to take the address of a variable you've marked with the register keyword.
I've experienced this sort of pain as well, and eventually found the only real way around it was to look at output assembly to try and determine what is causing gcc to go off the deepend. There are other things you can do but it depends on exactly what your code is trying to do. I was working in a very very large function with a large amount of computed goto mayhem in which minor (seemingly innocuous) changes could cause catastrophic performance hits. If you're doing similar there are a few things you can do to try and mitigate the problem, but the details are somewhat icky so i'll forgo discussing them here unless it's actually relevant.
It depends on the processor you are using. Or should I say, yes you can with the register keyword, but this is frowned upon unless you are using a simple processor with no pipe-lining and a single core. These days GCC can do a way better job than you can with register allocation. Trust it.