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| Posted by Dan Olson in reply to Mike | PermalinkReply |
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Dan Olson
| "Mike" <none@none.com> writes:
> The ability to do "volatile" memory access has come up here at DConf.
>
> Right now I'm utilizing a bug in GDC as a feature to do what I need. GDC implements shared as volatile, so I'm able to use this "bug" to my advantage. Iain has proposed a solution here (http://bugzilla.gdcproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126). Iain has explained to me that shared and volatile actually have similar, but different semantics.
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> Walter has proposed use peek() and poke() built-ins implemented in the
> runtime that can be given special treatment by the compiler.
>
> I would like to find a *universal* D solution to this, so I can have nice portable code that works across all compilers, so I'd like to ask the LCD contributors to chime in with their thoughts.
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> Does LDC currently have a solution for this? I hope we can all come to some agreement on an implementation that is uniform across all compilers. Please participate in the GDC discussion and let us know your thoughts.
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
I don't know LDC solution, but it looks like shared is not like a C volatile.
In my C experience, volatile can work, but only with simple memory-mapped registers and variables set by interrupt handlers. Setting/clearing individual bits in registers sometimes didn't do what was intended (eg fifoctl |= 0x04 may write all bits in register fifoctl instead of bit set and sometimes that is not what you want). Vender C compilers for specific chips usually have extensions to set/get/tst individual bits like bit types or have bit operators on ptrs (fifoctl.2 = 1 to set bit 2 in fifo register).
When I use gcc for embedded work, there is usually a lot of disassembly to make sure the compiler is generating the correct instructions to access registers. Sometimes I just write assembly instead of relying on compiler behavior.
I don't know the answer, but I don't think volatile is enough. Maybe take peek/poke instrinsics a little further to provide common memory access operations that all D compilers can provide and do the right thing for their target cpu, like use bitset instruction.
load, store, bitset/clr/tst, etc
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Dan
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