perspective | data visualization and analytics component | Data Visualization library

(This answer is a summary of comments posted above by Antti Haapala, klutt and Peter Cordes.)

GCC allocates more space than "necessary" in order to ensure that the stack is properly aligned for the call to proc: the stack pointer must be adjusted by a multiple of 16, plus 8 (i.e. by an odd multiple of 8). Why does the x86-64 / AMD64 System V ABI mandate a 16 byte stack alignment?

What's strange is that the code in the book doesn't do that; the code as shown would violate the ABI and, if proc actually relies on proper stack alignment (e.g. using aligned SSE2 instructions), it may crash.

So it appears that either the code in the book was incorrectly copied from compiler output, or else the authors of the book are using some unusual compiler flags which alter the ABI.

Modern GCC 11.2 emits nearly identical asm (Godbolt) using -Og -mpreferred-stack-boundary=3 -maccumulate-outgoing-args, the former of which changes the ABI to maintain only 2^3 byte stack alignment, down from the default 2^4. (Code compiled this way can't safely call anything compiled normally, even standard library functions.) -maccumulate-outgoing-args used to be the default in older GCC, but modern CPUs have a "stack engine" that makes push/pop single-uop so that option isn't the default anymore; push for stack args saves a bit of code size.

One difference from the book's asm is a movl $0, %eax before the call, because there's no prototype so the caller has to assume it might be variadic and pass AL = the number of FP args in XMM registers. (A prototype that matches the args passed would prevent that.) The other instructions are all the same, and in the same order as whatever older GCC version the book used, except for choice of registers after call proc returns: it ends up using movslq %edx, %rdx instead of cltq (sign-extend with RAX).

CS:APP 3e global edition is notorious for errors in practice problems introduced by the publisher (not the authors), but apparently this code is present in the North American edition, too. So this may be the author's mistake / choice to use actual compiler output with weird options. Unlike some of the bad global edition practice problems, this code could have come unmodified from some GCC version, but only with non-standard options.

Related: Why does GCC allocate more space than necessary on the stack, beyond what's needed for alignment? - GCC has a missed-optimization bug where it sometimes reserves an additional 16 bytes that it truly didn't need to. That's not what's happening here, though.

You're in a special case where your fragments are either fully opaque or fully transparent, so it's possible to get depth-testing and blending to work at the same time. The actual problem is, that for depth testing even a fully transparent fragment will store it's depth value. You can prevent the writing by explicitly discarding the fragment in the shader. Something like:

You can create a templated archetype and make type-tagged versions of that.

I made this a while back and haven't used it yet, so no testing, but I think the idea should be sound:

To expand on the answer given in the comments, the first p is an immutable value, while the second p is a function. If you refer to an immutable value multiple times, then (obviously) its value doesn't change over time. But if you invoke a function multiple times, it executes each time, even if the arguments are the same each time.

Note that this is true even for pure functional languages, such as Haskell. If you want to avoid this execution cost, there's a specific technique called memoization that can be used to return cached results when the same inputs occur again. However, memoization has its own costs, and I'm not aware of any mainstream functional language that automatically memoizes all function calls.

Problem #1: potentially_mutate is incorrectly marked as a safe function while it can cause undefined behavior (e.g. what if I pass in an invalid pointer?). So we need to mark it unsafe and document our assumptions for safe usage:

I think this might be an instance of the TypeScript design limitation reported in microsoft/TypeScript#41164. As mentioned there,

Certain circularities are allowed [...] but other circularities aren't, e.g.

1. The second way is called Data URL, which allow embed small files inline in HTML/CSS, for example:

Try changing transform-origin to 50%

In general, you have 2 strategies:

1. Instrument your application with some sort of logging/tracing framework, and then try to replicate some sort of tracing mixin-like functionality to apply global/local tracing depending on which parts of code you apply the mixins.

2. Recompile your code with some sort of tracing instrumentation feature enabled for your compiler or runtime, and then use the associated tracing compiler/runtime-specific tools/frameworks to transform/sift through the data.

For 1, this will require you to manually insert more code or something like _penter/_pexit for MSVC manually or create some sort of ScopedLogger that would (hopefully!) log async to some external file/stream/process. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as having a separate process control the trace tracking would probably be better in the case where the traced process crashes. Regardless, you'd probably have to refactor your code since C++ does not have great first-class support for metaprogramming to refactor/instrument code at a module/global level. However, this is not an uncommon pattern anyways for larger applications; for example, AWS X-Ray is an example of a commercial tracing service (though, typically, I believe it fits the use case of tracing network calls and RPC calls rather than in-process function calls).

For 2, you can try something like utrace or something compiler-specific: MSVC has various tools like Performance Explorer, LLVM has XRay, GCC has gprof. You essentially compile in a sort of "debug++" mode or there is some special OS/hardware/compiler magic to automatically insert tracing instructions or markers that help the runtime trace your desired code. These tracing-enabled programs/runtimes typically emit to some sort of unique tracing format that must then be read by a unique tracing format reader.

Finally, to dynamically build the graph in memory is a a similar story. Like the tracing strategies above, there are a variety of application and runtime-level libraries to help trace your code that you can interact with programmatically. Even the simplest version of creating ScopedTracer objects that log to a tracing file can then be fitted with a consumer thread that owns and updates the trace graph with whatever desired latency and data durability requirements you have.