Stack-based typed assembly language

  • Authors:

  • Greg Morrisett;Karl Crary;Neal Glew;David Walker

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA;Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA;Intertrust, 4750 Patrick Henry Drive, Santa Clara, CA 95054, USA;Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Functional Programming
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This paper presents STAL, a variant of Typed Assembly Language with constructs and types to support a limited form of stack allocation. As with other statically-typed low-level languages, the type system of STAL ensures that a wide class of errors cannot occur at run time, and therefore the language can be adapted for use in certifying compilers where security is a concern. Like the Java Virtual Machine Language (JVML), STAL supports stack allocation of local variables and procedure activation records, but unlike the JVML, STAL does not pre-suppose fixed notions of procedures, exceptions, or calling conventions. Rather, compiler writers can choose encodings for these high-level constructs using the more primitive RISC-like mechanisms of STAL. Consequently, some important optimizations that are impossible to perform within the JVML, such as tail call elimination or callee-saves registers, can be easily expressed within STAL.