In chapter 9 we were introduced to functions and we saw that they have to follow a number of conventions in order to play nice with other functions. We also briefly mentioned the stack, as an area of memory owned solely by the function. In this chapter we will go in depth with the stack and why it is important for functions.

In previous chapters we learnt the foundations of ARM assembler: registers, some arithmetic operations, loads and stores and branches. Now it is time to put everything together and add another level of abstraction to our assembler skills: functions.

In the previous chapter we saw that the second operand of most arithmetic instructions can use a shift operator which allows us to shift and rotate bits. In this chapter we will continue learning the available indexing modes of ARM instructions. This time we will focus on load and store instructions.

ARM architecture has been for long targeted at embedded systems. Embedded systems usually end being used in massively manufactured products (dishwashers, mobile phones, TV sets, etc). In this context margins are very tight so a designer will always try to spare as much components as possible (a cent saved in hundreds of thousands or even millions of appliances may pay off). One relatively expensive component is memory although every day memory is less and less expensive. Anyway, in constrained memory environments being able to save memory is good and ARM instruction set was designed with this goal in mind. It will take us several chapters to learn all of these techniques, today we will start with one feature usually named shifted operand.

Control structures

In the previous chapter we learnt branch instructions. They are really powerful tools because they allow us to express control structures. Structured programming is an important milestone in better computing engineering (a foundational one, but nonetheless an important one). So being able to map usual structured programming constructs in assembler, in our processor, is a Good Thing™.