When I said I’d never written a compiler, that’s actually a lie: I did some work on the Ceylon compiler a few years back. It wasn’t a very enriching experience but at least I know what ASTs and visitors are.

Anyway, the C-like syntax I talked about Friday might have been a little optimistic. I wanted the source to not be full of stack-shuffling but that’s not going to happen. Partly because I’d been assuming that the problem of compiling to a stack-based instruction set was solved: I was thinking of Java, but of course Java has local variables so it’s not exactly a stack-based instruction set, it’s stack and 65,536 registers–kind of the opposite problem! I didn’t find much online about compiling to stack-based instruction sets other than “it’s hard”.

I could probably manage something, but given that the total output of the compiler for glibc will likely be a hundred or so bytes of instructions, it doesn’t make sense to spend a huge amount of time on it.

The Infinity function compiler is therefore going to be something of a helpful assembler.

Yesterday I reworked the note format to allow functions as first-class objects, and then I had an idea about how to implement the note compiler.

I’d already thought I could have the compiler emit assembly to avoid having to think about endianness, but I couldn’t figure out how to do other platform-specific stuff like 32- vs 64-bit, or choosing which of the three LWP ID to thread descriptor mapping styles to use. My idea was to not only output to the assembler but to input from the C preprocessor as well. That way I can do all the conditional stuff in there, driven by glibc’s include files and CPPFLAGS.

Yeah, I think I can write a compiler that knows nothing about the platform it’s compiling for.

So, I spent all morning messing around with glibc’s build system. I’ve come up with this:

1. Each machine’s tls.h will have some Infinity definitions following the ones for libthread_db. Here’s the one for x86_64:

   /* Magic for libthread_db to know how to do THREAD_SELF.  */
   #define DB_THREAD_SELF_INCLUDE   /* For the FS constant.  */
   #define DB_THREAD_SELF CONST_THREAD_AREA (64, FS)
   
   /* Magic for Infinity to know how to do THREAD_SELF.  */
   #define I8_THREAD_SELF I8_TS_CONST_THREAD_AREA
   #define I8_TS_CTA_VALUE FS

   I could probably generate the libthread_db ones from the Infinity ones… but… later.

2. glibc has a script to generate assembler include files, to get constants and offsets from C headers into the assembler. I wrote a tls-infinity.sym file that the build system turns into tls-infinity.h for me.
3. The source for map_lwp2thr is infinity_map_lwp2thr.i8. That includes tls-infinity.h and, on x86_64, conditionally includes infinity_lookup_th_unique_cta.i8 to perform the mapping in the correct way for that platform.
4. infinity_map_lwp2thr.i8 gets fed into the C preprocessor which a) does all the conditionality and b) expands all the constants (as a total bonus!)

This leaves me with this lovely file to write a compiler for.

I’ve never written a compiler.

Yesterday I had my first Infinity milestone. I have a glibc with notes implementing libthread_db’s td_ta_map_lwp2thr and a GDB that loads and executes them. I did a side-by-side test calling the Infinity libpthread::map_lwp2thr function every time libthread_db’s td_ta_map_lwp2thr was called and comparing the results… and it worked! You could see the DWARF if you’re interested.

I’ve had something of a look at all the five functions I need to implement now and I’m pretty sure I have a handle on what infrastructure is needed to support them. The one thing I’m missing at present is function calls (infinity-infinity and infinity-other), which I’ll likely handle with a new instruction (DW_OP_GNU_i8call or something). That’s probably the only extension I need. It’s definitely necessary because one of the arguments to td_ta_thr_iter is a function that td_ta_thr_iter then calls. Infinity basically needs first-class functions for this.

I also have a pretty good idea of how to hook it into GDB’s Linux thread_db code. I’ll write a bunch of functions in GDB’s common code with the same signatures as libthread_db’s functions and pass them to the existing thread_db code by pointer. Doing it that way means the existing thread_db code in GDB and gdbserver can be left unmodified. I’ll implement the bookkeeping stuff there too, probably using the thread_agent type to pass around whatever context I need.

At the moment I’m using GDB’s existing DWARF interpreter to execute the notes, but I may well end up writing a new one for it. Firstly because the existing interpreter is deeply embedded into the GDB side: it uses gdbarch, values, types, etc, none of which are currently in common code. And secondly because the existing interpreter is written to evaluate lots of different DWARF expressions once (or, a small number of times). It’s input is raw DWARF, which it decodes instruction-by-instruction. The use case for the Infinity interpreter is executing a small number of expressions lots of times, so some pre-analysis would be beneficial. The instructions could be expanded, with operands decoded and possibly translated, and common multi-instruction cases could be combined. Stuff like calls to builtin functions (ps_get_thread_area, ps_getpid) could be replaced with intrinsics. And, with some restrictions on the bytecode, I could pre-compute the stack depth and do one overflow check at function entry rather than overflow checks for every push. That kind of thing.

I’m expecting the addition of a second DWARF interpreter to GDB to be contentious, but they’ll optimized for different things and doing different things. For example, Infinity could work better with some type tracking (and will likely need it to make function calls secure) but it’s different from what GDB’s existing interpreter needs and it’s difficult to see how to combine the two without ending up with something that’s not very good at either. Not to mention that getting it to a point it can be moved to common code would likely slow it down a ton.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at.