Do any languages / compilers utilize the x86 ENTER instruction with a nonzero nesting level?

Question

Those familiar with x86 assembly programming are very used to the typical function prologue / epilogue:

push ebp ; Save old frame pointer.
mov  ebp, esp ; Po         


        

Answer 1

I did some instruction counting statistics on Linux boots using the Simics virtual platform, and found that ENTER was never used. However,there were quite a few LEAVE instructions in the mix. There was almost a 1-1 correlation between CALL and LEAVE. That would seem to corroborate the idea that ENTER is just slow and expensive, while LEAVE is pretty handy. This was measured on a 2.6-series kernel.

The same experiments on a 4.4-series and a 3.14-series kernel showed zero use of either LEAVE or ENTER. Presumably, the gcc code generation for the newer gccs used to compile these kernels has stopped emitting LEAVE (or the machine options are set differently).