Come on. Taking an argument list in an argument list object and passing that argument list as an argument list to a function is exactly what this was about. It's not a "simulation". It's a C feature for capturing and passing around argument lists. It actually does it.
> has to use va_ calls to extract the values. This would require a lot more work in the method
Loads from the stack at fixed offsets for every argument instead of having some of the arguments in registers and loading others from the stack at fixed offsets. Yes, that is more work.
> Returning everything as an object would mean boxing and unboxing primitive values at every call, which would be horrendously inefficient.
True, the runtimes I was thinking of box many things. But you can type-pun pointers to other things, so you don't necessarily have to box everything. I don't know enough about Objective-C's constraints, but I do note that the linked article did talk about using tagged pointers already.
Come on yourself. I'm talking about the what the actual objc_msgSend actually does. And to make sure I'm clear, what it actually does is get called with arbitrary parameters, pass those arbitrary parameters on to an unknown function implemented to take them as standard C parameters, and then that unknown function returns an arbitrary return value back to the caller.
You cannot implement this with plain C. That's a simple fact. If your idea doesn't work for a method that, say, takes a double and returns an fd_set as raw C types then your idea doesn't do what objc_msgSend does.
Yes, you can shift the problem around and come up with a system that you can implement in plain C. I outlined one approach for that, and you've outlined another. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not solving the same problem. So feel free to elaborate on other ways that it could be done, but don't tell me I'm wrong because you've come up with a way to solve a similar but different problem.
Come on. Taking an argument list in an argument list object and passing that argument list as an argument list to a function is exactly what this was about. It's not a "simulation". It's a C feature for capturing and passing around argument lists. It actually does it.
> has to use va_ calls to extract the values. This would require a lot more work in the method
Loads from the stack at fixed offsets for every argument instead of having some of the arguments in registers and loading others from the stack at fixed offsets. Yes, that is more work.
> Returning everything as an object would mean boxing and unboxing primitive values at every call, which would be horrendously inefficient.
True, the runtimes I was thinking of box many things. But you can type-pun pointers to other things, so you don't necessarily have to box everything. I don't know enough about Objective-C's constraints, but I do note that the linked article did talk about using tagged pointers already.