[C2hs] Function Hooks and Calling Convention

[Thomas DuBuisson]

>> > Though actually that might not help for the kernel headers because I
>> > think they do not declare the regparam calling convention and just rely
>> > on gcc flags when compiling.
>>
>> You are correct - the call convention has to be declared manually.
>> There is no reasonable way for c2hs to learn it.
>
> Do you have any suggestion for that? The information would have to be
> supplied somehow. I guess as command line parameters to c2hs. I guess we
> just need to mirror gcc in that respect, to accept some of the gcc flags
> that globally modify the ABI.
>
> c2hs --gcc-abi-mode=-fregparam=3

This is exactly what I would suggest.

> Of course it also needs ghc to support that FFI calling convention,
> which I understand you've made as a local ghc modification.
>
> The same applies to stdcall vs ccall however, so it's generally useful
> even if you never contribute the regparam calling convention.

True.  Perhaps I'll try pushing the regparm3 patch to HEAD.  The main
issue is flexibility - it would be much better to support some sort of
__attribute__() system so we don't have to manually ad regparmX for
all reasonable values of X.

>> >> In the end the solution I have is to manually write the above C
>> >> section and the foreign import call using a regparm3 calling
>> >> convention.  This isn't to say c2hs isn't used - its still hugely
>> >> helpful (so long as the headers remain easy to convert to ANSI C), but
>> >> just my quick experience.
>> >
>> > BTW, what do you mean about ANSI C?
>>
>> I meant there exists at least one aspect (perhaps a bug) to the kernel
>> headers that cause an error when c2hs tries to parse the headers.  In
>> the FC11 2.6.30 headers they use an enum when declaring an extern
>> function prototype - without declaring the enum (timers.h).  The
>> solution is to #include <linux/hrtimers.h>, which contains the enum
>> declaration.
>
> Ah, and gcc accepts this without warning?

Yes

> Perhaps you can boil down a test case and submit it. I tried hard when
> making the C parser to cover all the GNU extensions and I ran it over
> all the kernel sources for some older kernel release. So it's worth
> fixing these things to maintain its usability.

I just made this and gcc accepts it without issue:

---- START enum.h ----
extern enum hello hello_fn(int);
---- END enum.h ----

This can be # included in any .c and gcc will compile it without
complaint (even with -Wall).  OTOH, c2hs will not parse such a file.

Thomas