Manuel Rigger, Stefan Marr, Stephen Kell, David Leopoldseder, H. Mössenböck
{"title":"An Analysis of x86-64 Inline Assembly in C Programs","authors":"Manuel Rigger, Stefan Marr, Stephen Kell, David Leopoldseder, H. Mössenböck","doi":"10.1145/3186411.3186418","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":176740,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2018-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"17","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3186411.3186418","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 17
Abstract
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.