This adds debugging code to detect null pointer dereferences, as well as pointer arithmetic on null pointers (which is also undefined behavior, and can lead to later dereferences of the resulting pointers).
Note that ORCA/Pascal can already detect null pointer dereferences as part of its more general range-checking code. This implementation for ORCA/C will report the same error as ORCA/Pascal ("Subrange exceeded"). However, it does not include any of the other forms of range checking that ORCA/Pascal does, and (unlike in ORCA/Pascal) it is controlled by a separate flag from stack overflow checking.
When a function has a single return statement at the end and meets certain other constraints, we now generate a different intermediate code instruction to evaluate the return value as part of the return operation, rather than assigning it to (effectively) a variable and then reading that value again to return it.
This approach could actually be used for all returns in C code, but for now we only use it for a single return at the end. Directly applying it in other cases could increase the code size by duplicating the function epilogue code.
This allows it to use MVN-based copying code in more cases, including when moving to/from local variables on the stack. This is slightly shorter and more efficient than calling a helper function.
This differs from the usual ORCA/C behavior of treating all floating-point parameters as extended. With the option enabled, they will still be passed in the extended format, but will be converted to their declared type at the start of the function. This is needed for strict standards conformance, because you should be able to take the address of a parameter and get a usable pointer to its declared type. The difference in types can also affect the behavior of _Generic expressions.
The implementation of this is based on ORCA/Pascal, which already did the same thing (unconditionally) with real/double/comp parameters.
Previously, one-byte loads were typically done by reading a 16-bit value and then masking off the upper 8 bits. This is a problem when accessing softswitches or slot IO locations, because reading the subsequent byte may have some undesired effect. Now, ORCA/C will do an 8-bit read for such cases, if the volatile qualifier is used.
There were also a couple optimizations that could occasionally result in not all the bytes of a larger value actually being read. These are now disabled for volatile loads that may access softswitches or IO.
These changes should make ORCA/C more suitable for writing low-level software like device drivers.
This affects functions whose body spans multiple files due to includes, or is treated as doing so due to #line directives. ORCA/C will now generate a COP 6 instruction to record each source file change, allowing debuggers to properly track the flow of execution across files.
This makes it more likely that unsupported ops on long long or any other types added in the future will give an error rather than silently generating bad code.
Also, update a comment.
Per the C standards, the % operator should give a remainder after division, such that (a/b)*b + a%b equals a (provided that a/b is representable). As such, the operation of % is defined for cases where either or both of the operands are negative. Since division truncates toward 0, a%b should give a negative result (or 0) in cases where a is negative.
Previously, the % operator was essentially behaving like the "mod" operator in Pascal, which is equivalent for positive operands but not if either operand is negative. It would generally give incorrect results in those cases, or in some cases give compile-time or run-time errors.
This patch addresses both 16-bit and 32-bit signed computations at run time, and operations in constant expressions. The approach at run time is to call existing division routines, which return the correct remainder, except always as a positive number. The generated code checks the sign of the first operand, and if it is negative negates the remainder.
The code generated is somewhat large (especially for the 32-bit case), so it might be sensible to put it in a library function and call that, but for now it's just generated in-line. This avoids introducing a dependency on a new library function, so the generated code remains compatible with older versions of ORCALib (e.g. the GNO one).
Fixes#10.
Stephen Heumann
mikew50