⁂
What happens when you call console.log or similar in your language of choice?
Those are usually language primitives implemented in C or C++. Let’s use V8 as an example, the JavaScript runtime written in C++ that powers Chrome and Node.js.
It will first call a utility funciton WriteToFile:
void D8Console::Log(const debug::ConsoleCallArguments& args,
const v8::debug::ConsoleContext&) {
WriteToFile(nullptr, stdout, isolate_, args);
}
https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/4b9b23521e/src/d8-console.cc#L52-L55
Which in turn, after preprocessing the JavaScript values will eventually call fwrite.
void WriteToFile(const char* prefix, FILE* file, Isolate* isolate,
const debug::ConsoleCallArguments& args) {
if (prefix) fprintf(file, "%s: ", prefix);
for (int i = 0; i < args.Length(); i++) {
HandleScope handle_scope(isolate);
if (i > 0) fprintf(file, " ");
Local arg = args[i];
Local str_obj;
if (arg->IsSymbol()) arg = Local::Cast(arg)->Name();
if (!arg->ToString(isolate->GetCurrentContext()).ToLocal(&str_obj)) return;
v8::String::Utf8Value str(isolate, str_obj);
int n = static_cast<int>(fwrite(*str, sizeof(**str), str.length(), file));
if (n != str.length()) {
printf("Error in fwrite\n");
base::OS::ExitProcess(1);
}
}
fprintf(file, "\n");
}
https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/4b9b23521e/src/d8-console.cc#L26
The function fwrite is part of the C standard library, also known as libc.
There are several libc implementations on different platforms. On Linux the popular ones are glibc and musl.
Let’s take musl.
There, fwrite is implemented in C as following:
size_t fwrite(const void *restrict src, size_t size, size_t nmemb, FILE *restrict f)
{
size_t k, l = size*nmemb;
if (!size) nmemb = 0;
FLOCK(f);
k = __fwritex(src, l, f);
FUNLOCK(f);
return k==l ? nmemb : k/size;
}
https://github.com/bminor/musl/blob/05ac345f89/src/stdio/fwrite.c#L28-L36
After a bit of indirection, this will call
a utility function __stdio_write, which will then make an (operating) system call writev.
size_t __stdio_write(FILE *f, const unsigned char *buf, size_t len)
{
struct iovec iovs[2] = {
{ .iov_base = f->wbase, .iov_len = f->wpos-f->wbase },
{ .iov_base = (void *)buf, .iov_len = len }
};
struct iovec *iov = iovs;
size_t rem = iov[0].iov_len + iov[1].iov_len;
int iovcnt = 2;
ssize_t cnt;
for (;;) {
cnt = syscall(SYS_writev, f->fd, iov, iovcnt);
/* … */
}
}
https://github.com/bminor/musl/blob/05ac345f89/src/stdio/__stdio_write.c#L15
The syscall symbol here is a macro, which after some serious preprocessor hackery, will expand to __syscall3.
System calls differ between operating systems, and the way to perform them differs between processor architectures.
It usually requires to write (or generate) a bit of assembly.
On x86-64 musl defines __syscall3 as following:
static __inline long __syscall3(long n, long a1, long a2, long a3)
{
unsigned long ret;
__asm__ __volatile__ ("syscall" : "=a"(ret) : "a"(n), "D"(a1), "S"(a2),
"d"(a3) : "rcx", "r11", "memory");
return ret;
}
https://github.com/bminor/musl/blob/593caa4563/arch/x86_64/syscall_arch.h#L26-L32
This sets up the system call number and arguments.
On x86-64 the instruction for making system calls is called syscall.
After the syscall is made, the control transfers to the (Linux, in this case) kernel. But that’s a whole ’nother story…
This blog post was inspired by the answer I wrote on Quora: How does C/C++ io work under the hood? ■
⁂
