stdcall and cdecl

Question

There are (among others) two types of calling conventions - stdcall and cdecl. I have few questions on them:

1. When a cdecl fun

Answer 1

The caller and the callee need to use the same convention at the point of invokation - that's the only way it could reliably work. Both the caller and the callee follow a predefined protocol - for example, who needs to clean up the stack. If conventions mismatch your program runs into undefined behavior - likely just crashes spectacularly.

This is only required per invokation site - the calling code itself can be a function with any calling convention.

You shouldn't notice any real difference in performance between those conventions. If that becomes a problem you usually need to make less calls - for example, change the algorithm.

Answer 2

a) When a cdecl function is called by the caller, how does a caller know if it should free up the stack?

The cdecl modifier is part of the function prototype (or function pointer type etc.) so the caller get the info from there and acts accordingly.

b) If a function which is declared as stdcall calls a function(which has a calling convention as cdecl), or the other way round, would this be inappropriate?

No, it's fine.

c) In general, can we say that which call will be faster - cdecl or stdcall?

In general, I would refrain from any such statements. The distinction matters eg. when you want to use va_arg functions. In theory, it could be that stdcall is faster and generates smaller code because it allows to combine popping the arguments with popping the locals, but OTOH with cdecl, you can do the same thing, too, if you're clever.

The calling conventions that aim to be faster usually do some register-passing.

Answer 3

I want to improve on @adf88's answer. I feel that pseudocode for the STDCALL does not reflect the way of how it happens in reality. 'a', 'b', and 'c' aren't popped from the stack in the function body. Instead they are popped by the ret instruction (ret 12 would be used in this case) that in one swoop jumps back to the caller and at the same time pops 'a', 'b', and 'c' from the stack.

Here is my version corrected according to my understanding:

STDCALL:

/* 1. calling STDCALL in pseudo-assembler (similar to what the compiler outputs) */
push on the stack a copy of 'z', then copy of 'y', then copy of 'x'
call
move contents of register A to 'i' variable


/* 2. STDCALL 'Function' body in pseaudo-assembler */
copy 'a' (from stack) to register A
copy 'b' (from stack) to register B
add A and B, store result in A
copy 'c' (from stack) to register B
add A and B, store result in A
jump back to caller code and at the same time pop 'a', 'b' and 'c' off the stack (a, b and
     c are removed from the stack in this step, result in register A)