Hard-coded hardware addresses in C/C++

I read a blog post “reinterpret_cast vs. constant expression” that discusses how to get rid of C-style casts for code such as

#define FOO ((struct S*)0xdff000)

But there is no need to have hard-coded addresses in the code – it is better to declare a normal structure

extern struct S hw_s;

and tell the linker to place it at address 0xdff000 using an assembly file containing the lines

.global hw_s
hw_s = 0xdff000

FOO can now be defined without a cast

#define FOO &hw_s

although it is probably better to use hw_s directly...

It is good to get rid of hard-coded addresses in C/C++ code even if you do not care about ugly casts. One reason is that the compiler cannot know which objects the hard-coded addresses point to, which restricts the data flow analysis. One other reason is that hard-coded addresses interact badly with instruction selection in the backend. This is especially true for code accessing hardware registers that expand to assignments of the form

*(volatile int *)(0xdff008) = 0;
*(volatile int *)(0xdff010) = 10;

The best way of generating the code depends on the CPU architecture, but it usually involves loading a base address into a register and storing using a “base + offset” addressing mode, so the compiler needs to split and re-combine the addresses (which is complicated as there are often restrictions on which offsets are valid, the cost of the base depends on the value, etc.). The ARM backend is good at this, but I have seen many cases where much slower and larger code than necessary is generated for more obscure architectures. For example, GCC 7.1 for RISC-V compiles

void foo(void)
{
  *(volatile int *)(0xfffff00023400008) = 0;
  *(volatile int *)(0xfffff00023400010) = 10;
}

to

foo:
 lui a5,%hi(.LC0)
 ld a5,%lo(.LC0)(a5)
 li a4,10
 sw zero,0(a5)
 lui a5,%hi(.LC1)
 ld a5,%lo(.LC1)(a5)
 sw a4,0(a5)
 ret
.LC0:
 .dword -17591594647544
.LC1:
 .dword -17591594647536

instead of the smaller and faster

foo:
 lui a5,%hi(.LC0)
 ld a5,%lo(.LC0)(a5)
 li a4,10
 sw zero,8(a5)
 sw a4,16(a5)
 ret
.LC0:
 .dword -17591594647552

you get by writing through a normal structure.