[Rd] Samples of external code with various compilers?

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> On Tue, 3 Dec 2002 10:01:08 +1100 , Mark.Bravington@csiro.au wrote:
>
> >what call mode to use for procedures (i.e. stack order and removal of
> >parameters; I had always used STDCALL with S and R, and then found I was
> >getting bugs with R 1.6.1. So in desperation I eventually changed this at
> >random to C-CALL, and things started working again in R-- and continued to
> >work in S. To my continued puzzlement, actually.)
>
> The difference between stdcall and cdecl is that in the former, the
> routine removes parameters from the stack, whereas in the latter, the
> caller does.
>
> R uses cdecl.  When the routine used stdcall, the parameters would be
> removed twice.  My guess about why this worked was that the
> "do_dotCode" routine had enough redundant locals that having some of
> them removed from the stack didn't cause obvious problems.  In 1.6,
> do_dotCode was modified, and now it messes up if you steal its locals.
>
> Most other Windows programs use stdcall.  Using the stdcall convention
> to call a cdecl routine means that the parameters won't be removed
> from the stack by either the caller or the routine.  However, S-PLUS
> is probably like R, and only makes one call to your routine from the
> function that calls it.  When it returns, the extra junk on the stack
> is removed.

S-PLUS 2000 was like R.  S-PLUS 6 is cleverer and tries to figure out
(from the decoration on the symbol, I believe) if stdcall or cdecl is
required, but it defaults to stdcall.

> Since stdcall is the Windows standard, and R uses cdecl, I've been
> thinking lately about whether it would be worth putting in stdcall as
> an option to .C and .Fortran.  Possibly we could just switch to
> stdcall, and rely on the behaviour in the paragraph above to handle
> cdecl routines, but that sounds pretty ugly to me.

You can't because of callbacks into R from the compiled code.  That's
where the problems arise with S-PLUS 6: such callbacks have to be stdcall
there.

stdcall requires that all the calls have the right number and type of
parameters.  That's really difficult to check with Fortran code (or with C
code with incomplete headers).  Working with S-PLUS 6 has been much more
error-prone precisely because of the use of stdcall, and I don't see it as
a way forward.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595