Fast procedure calls

Butler Lampson

 

Citation: Proc. 1st International Symposium on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ACM Sigplan Notices 17, 4 (Apr. 1982), pp 66-75.

Links: Abstract, Acrobat. Here is an HTML version created by OCR for the benefit of search engines; it is not meant for human consumption.

Email: blampson@microsoft.com. This paper is at http://www.research.microsoft.com.

 

Abstract:

A mechanism for control transfers should handle a variety of applications (e.g., procedure calls and returns, coroutine transfers, exceptions, process switches) in a uniform way.  It should also allow an implementation in which the common cases of procedure call and return are extremely fast, preferably as fast as unconditional jumps in the normal case. This paper describes such a mechanism and methods for its efficient implementation.