Re: GCC for Mac OS X

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Toon Moene wrote:
> 
> Stan Shebs wrote:
> 
> [ An apple a day keeps the doctor away :-) ]
> 
> > 3. PowerPC code quality.  Apple has more than a few bit-twiddling
> > graphics engineers who pore over inner loops and such.  They need
> > the compiler to generate faster code.  Exception handling and
> > AltiVec support are two specific areas; for instance, Apple is
> > using a big hairy patch from Motorola for AltiVec code gen, but
> > from what I've seen of the patch so far, it seems problematic
> > for mainstream GCC.
> 
> Well, how about hacking on that patch until it looks reasonable ?  Aside
> from your graphics engineers, us physicists are very much interested in
> a g77 generating vector arithmetic on a home computer (or even a laptop
> - if Apple ever manages to put a G4 in a PowerBook ;-)

In between doing email, I'm studying the patch.  It seems to involve a
number of source language extensions, which is the part that seems
especially difficult to justify for GCC.  On the other hand, the
extensions have already been adopted by other G4 compilers, so GCC may
want to do that just to keep up.  More as I find it out...

Stan