David

Is there a carry flag, perhaps like the floating point metadata flags?

I didn’t see one mentioned in the addu variations, and none of them directly showed “wrapped value with indication that a wrap happened” (bit-banging an adduw result notwithstanding).

Thanks!

The majority of my assembly language background is in 8-bit CPUs (6502) where Carry is widely used, so at first it’s jarring to see it missing. However, much of it is based in mathematical optimization and comparison tricks because of the narrow register width. With a reasonable register width and richer mathematical instructions, that becomes much less of an issue.

It’s also used for bit-packing with shifts, but of course is limited to 1-bit sizes when relying on Carry.

Marshaling and [de]serialization is one aspect that’s always a thorn in the side of execution speed, so being able to directly shift various N-bit-wide values in & out of wider numbers with under/overflow detection would be nice. Of course, if the individual steps in such an operation can be automatically executed in parallel, then the need for more powerful instructions goes away.

There are quite a few ABIs that use Carry as an in/out boolean flag, or side-band error return indicator. This is, of course, a result of registers being “expensive”, due to fixed register files. If belt slots are “cheaper”, then those can become normal parameters. However, there still is pressure on spilling that comes with this.

One interesting scenario that comes to mind is the SBCL compiler for Common Lisp. When calling a function in Lisp, it is unknown how many values it will return. In SBCL x86-64, a single valued return returns with carry clear. For multi-valued return, carry is set and the count of returned values is held in RCX (which is a scratch register otherwise).

While it’s probably a more general question than metadata, how would you address older values on the belt after a function call which returns a variable/unknown number of return values?