Who
Aaron Ballman is a Principal Compiler Engineer for Intel and is the lead maintainer of the Clang open source compiler. He has two decades of experience writing cross-platform frameworks in C/C++, compiler & language design, and software engineering best practices and is currently a voting member of the C (WG14) and C++ (WG21) standards committees.
In case you can't figure it out easily enough, the views expressed here are my personal views and not the views of my employer, my past employers, my future employers, or some random person on the street. Please yell only at me if you disagree with what you read.
Tag Archives: x86
How Variable Argument Lists Work in C
Variable argument lists are very arcane in the world of C. You’ll see them expressed in function signatures as … at the end of the parameter list, but you may not understand how they work or what they do.
Describing the MSVC ABI for Structure Return Types
An ABI is an “application binary interface”, which is basically a contract between pieces of executable code on how to behave. The ABI dictates things like how parameters are passed, where return values go, how to create and destroy stack … Continue reading
Tail Calls
A tail call is a specific pattern of source code where the last instruction executed in a method is another function call. For instance: In this code, the call to last is considered a tail call because there are no … Continue reading
Frustrations in Assembly
At my day job, we do a lot of complex math calculations in our frameworks. To increase performance, we have enabled the optimizer to use certain assembly instruction sets such as MMX and SSE. However, we have found that not … Continue reading
The Importance of Calling Conventions
Calling conventions are something you generally don’t have to worry about as a programmer because the compiler usually takes care of everything for you. But when you start interacting with code outside of your control (such as shared libraries), calling … Continue reading
