c - Does __asm{}; return the value of eax?

Question

Simple question. The function asm in C is used to do inline assembly in your code. But what does it return? Is it the conventional eax, and if not, what does it return?

Answer 1

__asm__ itself does not return a value. C standard does not define how __asm__ should handle the return value, so the behavior might be different between compilers. You stated that Visual Studio example is valid, but Visual Studio uses __asm. __asm__ is used at least by GCC.

Visual Studio

To get the result in a C program, you can place return value to eax in the assembly code, and return from the function. The caller will receive contents of eax as the return value. This is supported even with optimization enabled, even if the compiler decides to inline the function containing the __asm{} block.

It avoids a store/reload you'd otherwise get from moving the value to a C variable in the asm and returning that C variable, because MSVC inline asm syntax doesn't support inputs/outputs in registers (except for this return-value case).

Visual Studio 2015 documentation:

int power2( int num, int power )
{
   __asm
   {
      mov eax, num    ; Get first argument
      mov ecx, power  ; Get second argument
      shl eax, cl     ; EAX = EAX * ( 2 to the power of CL )
   }
   // Return with result in EAX
   // by falling off the end of a non-void function
}

clang -fasm-blocks supports the same inline-asm syntax but does not support falling off the end of a non-void function as returning the value that an asm{} block left in EAX/RAX. Beware of that if porting MSVC inline asm to clang. It will break horribly when compiled with optimization enabled (function inlining).

GCC

GCC inline assembly HOWTO does not contain a similar example. You can't use an implicit return as in Visual Studio, but fortunately you don't need to because GNU C inline asm syntax allows specifying outputs in registers. No hack is needed to avoid a store/reload of an output value.

The HOWTO shows that you can store the result to C variable inside the assembly block, and return value of that variable after the assembly block has ended. You can even use "=r"(var) to let the compiler pick its choice of register, in case EAX isn't the most convenient after inlining.

An example of an (inefficient) string copy function, returning value of dest:

static inline char * strcpy(char * dest,const char *src)
{
int d0, d1, d2;
__asm__ __volatile__(  "1:lodsb
"
                       "stosb
"
                       "testb %%al,%%al
"
                       "jne 1b"
                     : "=&S" (d0), "=&D" (d1), "=&a" (d2)
                     : "0" (src),"1" (dest) 
                     : "memory");
return dest;
}

(Note that dest isn't actually an output from the inline asm statement. The matching constraint for the dummy output operands tells the compiler the inline asm destroyed that copy of the variable so it needs to preserve it across the asm statement on its own somehow.)

---

If you omit a return statement in a non-void function with optimization enabled, you get a warning like warning: no return statement in function returning non-void [-Wreturn-type] and recent GCC/clang won't even emit a ret; it assumes this path of execution is never taken (because that would be UB). It doesn't matter whether or not the function contained an asm statement or not.