ares/docs/stack.md

# New Mars: Memory layout and representation

This document describes the current (2022/01/13) state of the memory layout and noun representation for New Mars.

## Noun representation

Nouns are represented as machine words with the MSBs as tag bits.
By treating a 0 MSB as the tag for a direct atom, we can compute directly with direct atoms without masking the tag.

|------|-----------------------|
| MSBs | Noun                  |
| 0    | Direct Atom           |
| 10   | Cell Pointer          |
| 110  | Indirect Atom Pointer |
|------|-----------------------|

A direct atom is an atom which fits in a machine word, less one bit for the tag. It is stored directly.

An indirect atom is an atom which is too big to be a direct atom.
It is thus represented as a tagged pointer.
The memory referenced is at least 64-bit aligned.
The first 64 bits are the size of the atom in bytes.
This is followed by that number of bytes containing the atom in little-endian order.

A cell is represented as a tagged pointer.
The memory referenced is adjacent machine words.
The machine word at the pointer is the noun representation of the head (left side/first) of the cell.
The machine word directly following (higher in memory) is the noun representation of the tail (right side/second) of the cell.

During collection the memory for indirect atoms and cells may be rewritten to indicate a _forwarding pointer_.
This is discussed further in the "Memory Layout" section.

## Memory Layout

Computation proceeds in a memory arena, using two stacks growing towards each other from opposite ends.
The stack growing from lower memory to higher is termed the "west" stack and lower memory is directionally "west."
The stack growing from higher memory to lower is termed the "east" stack and, similarly, higher memory is directionally "east."

Computational frames are always pushed onto the opposing stack from the current frame.
Thus the two stacks logically form one single computational stack.
The stack on which the current frame is located is termed the "polarity".
Thus, the current stack frame may be said to have "west" or "east" polarity.

Two pointers are kept in registers.
The "frame pointer" is changed only when pushing a new stack frame.
When the current polarity is west, it points to the westernmost byte in the current frame.
Slots relative to the frame (for register saves or return addresses) are addressed by offsetting eastward.
When the current polarity is east, it points to the easternmost byte _west of_ the current frame.
Slots relative to the frame are in this case addressed by offsetting westward.
Note that we do not reverse which "end" of a machine word we address by the polarity.

The "stack pointer" is changed when pushing a new stack frame, and also to allocate memory.
When the current polarity is west, it points to the westernmost byte east of the current frame.
When the current polarity is east, it points to the westernmost byte *of* the current frame.

When pushing a new frame, the frame pointer is always set to the stack pointer of the *previous* frame to the current.
This achieves the polarity reversal.
The stack pointer is offset east of the frame pointer by the machine words necessary (for a west frame) or west of the frame pointer (for an east frame).
Note that the bytecode instruction for a push implicitly adds two machine words to the requested stack frame size.
This is because each frame saves the previous frame's stack and frame pointer as its first and second word slots,
respectively.
This provides both a return mechanism (restore stack and frame pointer from current frame, flip polarity), and
a polarity-swapping push (frame pointer is previous stack pointer, stack pointer offset from frame pointer, flip polarity.

Allocation is achieved by saving the stack pointer, moving it east, and returning the saved pointer (for a west frame) or by moving the stack pointer west and returning the result (for an east frame).

When popping a frame, the result register is examined to provide a collection root.
Pointers which fall within the current frame are recursively chased and copied to the parent frames allocation area, bumping the saved stack pointer as this progresses. This ensures that data allocated in this frame (or a child frame and then copied here) which is live from the returned result is not lost when the frame is popped.

The collector makes use of memory just beyond the returning frame as an ephemeral stack, containing noun words to
be copied and a destination to copy them to.
Copying a cell results in a new cell allocation on the parent memory, and pushing both constituent nouns onto the
stack with the head and tail of the cell as destinations.
Copying a direct atom is just a matter of writing it to the destination.
Copying an indirect atom involves an allocation, copying of the atom's memory, and writing the new allocation to the saved destination.

Frames to which a call may return should reserve the first frame slot (after the frame and stack pointers) for the return address.
_Note that this makes it the ***caller's*** responsibility to push a new frame for a non-tail call._