Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!alberta!ubc-cs!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!rutgers!ucla-cs!admin.cognet.ucla.edu!casey
From: casey@admin.cognet.ucla.edu (Casey Leedom)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: CISC instructions
Keywords: C stack frame, argument passing, VAX calls instruction, pcc
Message-ID: <15577@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 28 Aug 88 23:48:18 GMT
References: <13254@mimsy.UUCP> <2912@wright.mips.COM> <13266@mimsy.UUCP>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: casey@cs.ucla.edu (Casey Leedom)
Organization: UCLA
Lines: 17

In article <13266@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
| In article <2912@wright.mips.COM> earl@mips.COM (Earl Killian) writes:
| > [2.8x faster version].  You mistakenly assumed you need a frame pointer, 
| > and used an argument pointer ....
| 
| Well, actually, I was thinking in terms of what I could do with PCC
| and the current 4.3BSD-tahoe, without doing serious surgery.  I need
| ap to make sigtramp work as is (otherwise I could just use positive
| offsets from fp, a la the Tahoe); and I need fp to keep PCC happy,
| and to make alloca() work.

  Actually Chris, the only thing you have to give up if you stop using AP
is nargs() (which isn't even documented and only the fortran library uses
it anymore).  We have both sigtramp and alloca() in 2.10BSD all without an
AP.

Casey