C runtime

[lukaszcz]

Basic version of the C runtime necessary to run compiled Juvix programs.

Runtime components

• Page allocator.
  • Manages allocation and deallocation of pages (64K by default), resorting to direct memory allocation from the OS / WebAssembly when needed.
• Object allocator.
  • Manages allocation of objects (constructors, boxed integers, etc).
  • Uses the page allocator to obtain more memory pages.
• Global call stack.
  • Functions for manual management of the call stack.
• Function call interface.
  • Macros for calling functions, saving & restoring live variables, allocating & extending closures.
  • Trampoline (dispatch loop) to implement JuvixAsm CallClosures.
• Memory access interface.
  • Macros for accessing constructor tag & fields, temporary variables & function arguments.
• Integers implemented by unboxed 31 bit ints, at first without overflow check.
• Structural equality on runtime values.
• Static storage of information about functions and constructors (e.g. for pretty-printing).
• Pretty-printing of runtime values.
• Error handling (stacktraces).
• Interpreter for IO actions.

Literature

• David Tarditi, Peter Lee, Anurag Acharya, No Assembly Required: Compiling Standard ML to C