An Analysis of x86-64 Inline Assembly in C Programs

Beschreibung

C codebases frequently embed nonportable and unstandardized elements such as inline assembly code. Such elements are not well understood, which poses a problem to tool developers who aspire to support C code. This paper investigates the use of x86-64 inline assembly in 1264 C projects from GitHub and combines qualitative and quantitative analyses to answer questions that tool authors may have. We found that 28.1% of the most popular projects contain inline assembly code, although the majority contain only a few fragments with just one or two instructions. The most popular instructions constitute a small subset concerned largely with multicore semantics, performance optimization, and hardware control. Our findings are intended to help developers of C-focused tools, those testing compilers, and language designers seeking to reduce the reliance on inline assembly. They may also aid the design of tools focused on inline assembly itself.

Zeitraum	25 März 2018
Ereignistitel	VEE '18 Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments
Veranstaltungstyp	Konferenz
Ort	USA/Vereinigte StaatenAuf Karte anzeigen