Contents

Introduction to OS X ABI Function Call Guide

Describes the function-calling conventions used in the architectures supported by OS X.

Organization of This Document

This document contains the following articles:

32-bit PowerPC Function Calling Conventions

64-bit PowerPC Function Calling Conventions

IA-32 Function Calling Conventions

x86-64 Function Calling Conventions

Each of these articles describes the data types that can be used to manipulate the arguments and results of function calls, how routines pass arguments to the functions they call, and how functions pass results to their callers. They also list the registers available in each architecture and whether their value is preserved after a function call.

See Also

The following documents contain information related to function calls in OS X.

PowerPC Numerics in Performance Documentation. Describes how floating-point operations are implemented in OS X.

System V Application Binary Interface: Intel386 Architecture Processor Supplement . Describes the data representation, register usage, stack management, and function-calling sequence the System V ABI uses in the IA-32 architecture. This document is located at http://www.sco.com/developers/devspecs/abi386-4.pdf .

System V Application Binary Interface AMD64 Architecture Processor Supplement . Describes the System V x86-64 ABI, on which the function calling conventions used in the OS X x86-64 environment are based.

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