Purpose of ESI & EDI registers?

Question

What is the actual purpose and use of the EDI & ESI registers in assembler?

I know they are used for string operations for one thing.

Can someone also gi

Answer 1

In addition to the registers being used for mass operations, they are useful for their property of being preserved through a function call (call-preserved) in 32-bit calling convention. The ESI, EDI, EBX, EBP, ESP are call-preserved whereas EAX, ECX and EDX are not call-preserved. Call-preserved registers are respected by C library function and their values persist through the C library function calls.

Jeff Duntemann in his assembly language book has an example assembly code for printing the command line arguments. The code uses esi and edi to store counters as they will be unchanged by the C library function printf. For other registers like eax, ecx, edx, there is no guarantee of them not being used by the C library functions.

https://www.amazon.com/Assembly-Language-Step-Step-Programming/dp/0470497025

See section 12.8 How C sees Command-Line Arguments.

Note that 64-bit calling conventions are different from 32-bit calling conventions, and I am not sure if these registers are call-preserved or not.