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Concept
Trampoline (computing)
Summary
In computer programming, the word trampoline has a number of meanings, and is generally associated with jump instructions (i.e. moving to different code paths).
Trampolines (sometimes referred to as indirect jump vectors) are memory locations holding addresses pointing to interrupt service routines, I/O routines, etc. Execution jumps into the trampoline and then immediately jumps out, or bounces, hence the term trampoline. They have many uses:
Trampoline can be used to overcome the limitations imposed by a central processing unit (CPU) architecture that expects to always find vectors in fixed locations.
When an operating system is booted on a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) machine, only one processor, the bootstrap processor, will be active. After the operating system has configured itself, it will instruct the other processors to jump to a piece of trampoline code that will initialize the processors and wait for the operating system to start scheduling threads on them.
As used in some Lisp implementations, a trampoline is a loop that iteratively invokes thunk-returning functions (continuation-passing style). A single trampoline suffices to express all control transfers of a program; a program so expressed is trampolined, or in trampolined style; converting a program to trampolined style is trampolining. Programmers can use trampolined functions to implement tail-recursive function calls in stack-oriented programming languages.
Continuation-passing style is a popular intermediate format for compilers of functional languages, because many control flow constructs can be elegantly expressed and tail call optimization is easy. When compiling to a language without optimized tail calls, one can avoid stack growth via a technique called trampolining. The idea is to not make the final continuation call inside the function, but to exit and to return the continuation to a trampoline. That trampoline is simply a loop that invokes the returned continuations. Hence, there are no nested function calls and the stack won’t grow.
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