@laiba-javed said in CS606 GDB 1 Solution and Discussion:
Do you think intermediate code generation is extra and time consuming step while translating or it is necessary or beneficial in some way?
Stack Allocation
We now need to access the ARs from the stack. The key distinction is that the location of the current AR is not known at compile time. Instead a pointer to the stack must be maintained dynamically.
We dedicate a register, call it SP, for this purpose. In this chapter we let SP point to the bottom of the current AR, that is the entire AR is above the SP. Since we are not supporting varargs, there is no advantage to having SP point to the middle of the AR as in the previous chapter.
The main procedure (or the run-time library code called before any user-written procedure) must initialize SP with
LD SP, #stackStart
where stackStart is a known-at-compile-time constant.
The caller increments SP (which now points to the beginning of its AR) to point to the beginning of the callee’s AR. This requires an increment by the size of the caller’s AR, which of course the caller knows.
Is this size a compile-time constant?
The book treats it as a constant. The only part that is not known at compile time is the size of the dynamic arrays. Strictly speaking this is not part of the AR, but it must be skipped over since the callee’s AR starts after the caller’s dynamic arrays.
Perhaps for simplicity we are assuming that there are no dynamic arrays being stored on the stack. If there are arrays, their size must be included in some way.