Assembly decoding help?

[Bertram Felgenhauer]

Justin Bailey wrote:
> I'm trying to get a feel for the assembly output by GHC on my
> platform. Below is a module containing one function and the associated
> assembly. I've put in comments what I think is going on, but I'd
> appreciate it if anyone could give me some pointers. I'd really like
> to know three things:
> 
>   * Why does _Add_unsafeShiftR_info check if (%esi) is 3?
>   * What's going on in _s86_info?
>   * At the end of _s87_info, 8 is added to %ebp and then jumped to. Is
> that a jump to the I# constructor and, if so, how did it's address get
> to that offset from %ebp?

One point that seems to irritate you is that ghc does pointer tagging;
the lower 2 bits of a pointer are zero if it points to an unevaluated
closure (a thunk); otherwise they encode a constructor. (I'm not sure
what happens in the case when there are more than 3 constructors. But
in your case there's only one, I#, with tag 01.)

Register usage (as far as I can see):
  %ebp - STG stack pointer
  %edi - Heap pointer (in particular cmpl 92(%ebx),%edi is a heap check
          and will trigger a GC)
  %esi - at start of *_info, points to most recently evaluated value.
  %ebx - points to some RTS global variables.

Rough outline of the code:

_Add_unsafeShiftR_info:
  find first argument, and evaluate it if it's not yet fully evaluated.
  continue at _s86_info. (note that a pointer to _s86_info, a
  continuation, is stored on the control stack)

_s86_info:
  store the first argument value on the stack, load the second one,
  and evaluate it if necessary.
  continue at _s87_info.

_s87_info:
  load both arguments, and compute result. The result is fully evaluated,
  so a tagged pointer is returned. (the -3 is -4, plus 1 for the tag)
  clean up the stack (the space for the two arguments is no longer needed)
  and jump to the continuation stored by the caller.

HTH,

Bertram