Re: va_list: i860

[Jeffrey A Law <law@cygnus.com>]

  In message <19990726000402.A4734@cygnus.com>you write:
  > The i860 is also unique in being the only port to have an out-of-line
  > __builtin_saveregs that it actually uses.  Sparc and MIPS also 
  > define one, but Sparc also provides an in-line version, and MIPS
  > does not have a call to __builtin_saveregs in va-mips.h, so it 
  > appears to be completely unused.
FYI, few ports use out of line __builtin_saveregs because doing so raises all
the problems we've been seeing with EH and other routines in libgcc.

We ran into the problems initially with X11R3 or X11R4 when building shared
versions of the X11 libs.  At that point in time shared libraries were not
complete in respect to including copies of libgcc routines they used.

So, the X libs had references to __builtin_saveregs, which in turn caused apps
to fail unless those apps were linked with gcc.  This was particularly nasty
for folks that used commercial apps (in our case FrameMaker) which referenced
shared X libraries.

Sometime around 1990/1991 we moved the sparc (and possibly other) ports away
from out of line saveregs functions.

A little bit of gcc history :-)

jeff