Calling convention

In computer science, a calling convention is an implementation-level (low-level) scheme for how subroutines receive parameters from their caller and how they return a result. Differences in various implementations include where parameters, return values, return addresses and scope links are placed, and how the tasks of preparing for a function call and restoring the environment afterward are divided between the caller and the callee.

Calling conventions may be related to a particular programming language's evaluation strategy but most often are not considered part of it (or vice versa), as the evaluation strategy is usually defined on a higher abstraction level and seen as a part of the language rather than as a low-level implementation detail of a particular language's compiler.

Calling conventions may differ in:

In some cases, differences also include the following:

Threaded code places all the responsibility for setting up for and cleaning up after a function call on the called code. The calling code does nothing but list the subroutines to be called. This puts all the function setup and cleanup code in one place—the prolog and epilog of the function—rather than in the many places that function is called. This makes threaded code the most compact calling convention.

Threaded code passes all arguments on the stack. All return values are returned on the stack. This makes naive implementations slower than calling conventions that keep more values in registers. However, threaded code implementations that cache several of the top stack values in registers—in particular, the return address—are usually faster than subroutine calling conventions that always push and pop the return address to the stack.

The default calling convention for programs written in the PL/I language passes all arguments by reference, although other conventions may optionally be specified. The arguments are handled differently for different compilers and platforms, but typically the argument addresses are passed via an argument list in memory. A final, hidden, address may be passed pointing to an area to contain the return value. Because of the wide variety of data types supported by PL/I a data descriptor may also be passed to define, for example, the lengths of character or bit strings, the dimension and bounds of arrays (dope vectors), or the layout and contents of a data structure. Dummy arguments are created for arguments which are constants or which do not agree with the type of argument the called procedure expects.

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