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Pair Your Compilers at the ABI Café
The ABI Café May 5th, 2024 Not sure if your compilers have matching ABIs? Then put them through the ultimate compatibility crucible and pair them up on a shift at The ABI Café! Find out if your one true pairing fastcalls for each other or are just another slowburn disaster. (Maid outfits optional but recommended.) I’m pretty sure I’ve tried to write some version of this article like 5 times over several years, but finally I got the right motivation, and I need to get some of this out of my head.
So I made abi-cafe, which let me describe a function signature in the abstract and generate code for the caller and callee, in Rust or C, and compile and link them together. As a result I’ve been at vaguely toying with the idea of abi-cafe 2.0 for quite a while, occasionally working through the theory and implementation of it, but needless to say it was all a bit exhausting and overwhelming, especially without the original motivation driving it forward. We already know how to analyze those, so the only thing we need to introduce here is an understanding of how to access each subfield, and a new kind of delimiter for “end of function argument” for easier bookkeeping and error reporting.
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