C calling conventions and passed arguments

Question

When making a function call in Linux (or OS X for that matter), can the callee modify the values of the arguments on the stack? I was under the assumption that since the ca

Answer 1

Yes, the callee can modify the arguments on the stack. As far as the callee is concerned, they are the same as local variables. The caller does clean them up but ignores the value.

If you're talking C or C++ POD, clean up is simply modifying the stack pointer.

If you're talking about C++ with a destructor, the caller is responsible for invoking the destructor but destructors for generic classes need to be written to cleanup any value.