Warning: This is the manual of the legacy Guile 2.2 series. You may want to read the manual of the current stable series instead.

9.3.7 Instruction Set

There are currently about 175 instructions in Guile’s virtual machine. These instructions represent atomic units of a program’s execution. Ideally, they perform one task without conditional branches, then dispatch to the next instruction in the stream.

Instructions themselves are composed of 1 or more 32-bit units. The low 8 bits of the first word indicate the opcode, and the rest of instruction describe the operands. There are a number of different ways operands can be encoded.

sn

An unsigned n-bit integer, indicating the sp-relative index of a local variable.

fn

An unsigned n-bit integer, indicating the fp-relative index of a local variable. Used when a continuation accepts a variable number of values, to shuffle received values into known locations in the frame.

cn

An unsigned n-bit integer, indicating a constant value.

l24

An offset from the current ip, in 32-bit units, as a signed 24-bit value. Indicates a bytecode address, for a relative jump.

i16

i32

An immediate Scheme value (see Immediate objects), encoded directly in 16 or 32 bits.

a32

b32

An immediate Scheme value, encoded as a pair of 32-bit words. a32 and b32 values always go together on the same opcode, and indicate the high and low bits, respectively. Normally only used on 64-bit systems.

n32

A statically allocated non-immediate. The address of the non-immediate is encoded as a signed 32-bit integer, and indicates a relative offset in 32-bit units. Think of it as SCM x = ip + offset.

r32

Indirect scheme value, like n32 but indirected. Think of it as SCM *x = ip + offset.

l32

lo32

An ip-relative address, as a signed 32-bit integer. Could indicate a bytecode address, as in make-closure, or a non-immediate address, as with static-patch!.

l32 and lo32 are the same from the perspective of the virtual machine. The difference is that an assembler might want to allow an lo32 address to be specified as a label and then some number of words offset from that label, for example when patching a field of a statically allocated object.

b1

A boolean value: 1 for true, otherwise 0.

xn

An ignored sequence of n bits.

An instruction is specified by giving its name, then describing its operands. The operands are packed by 32-bit words, with earlier operands occupying the lower bits.

For example, consider the following instruction specification:

Instruction: free-set! s12:dst s12:src x8:_ c24:idx

Set free variable idx from the closure dst to src.

The first word in the instruction will start with the 8-bit value corresponding to the free-set! opcode in the low bits, followed by dst and src as 12-bit values. The second word starts with 8 dead bits, followed by the index as a 24-bit immediate value.

Sometimes the compiler can figure out that it is compiling a special case that can be run more efficiently. So, for example, while Guile offers a generic test-and-branch instruction, it also offers specific instructions for special cases, so that the following cases all have their own test-and-branch instructions:

(if pred then else)
(if (not pred) then else)
(if (null? l) then else)
(if (not (null? l)) then else)

In addition, some Scheme primitives have their own inline implementations. For example, in the previous section we saw cons.

Finally, for instructions with operands that encode references to the stack, the interpretation of those stack values is up to the instruction itself. Most instructions expect their operands to be tagged SCM values (scm representation), but some instructions expect unboxed integers (u64 and s64 representations) or floating-point numbers (f64 representation). Instructions have static types: they must receive their operands in the format they expect. It’s up to the compiler to ensure this is the case. Unless otherwise mentioned, all operands and results are boxed as SCM values.