Re: AltiVec support in GCC

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Mike Stump wrote:
> 
> > Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 22:30:00 -0600 (CST)
> > From: Kumar Gala <kumar@chaos.ph.utexas.edu>
> > To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> 
> > The major issues that I have been told about, surrounds the fact that the
> > Motorola changes add a 'vector' primitive.
> 
> Sounds half way reasonable.  I have here in my hand a piece of paper,
> no, a compiler for the Pentium III SSE with intrinsic support for SSE.
> It adds a vector type to the compiler also.
> 
> Would be nice if a person in the know took the moto patches and the
> SSE patches and unified them...  If not, then the first set in, wins,
> and the other will just have to cope, extend and transform.

Since this is an extension to the dialect of C accepted by GCC, I would
hope there would be some effort to define the dialect before putting in
dueling patches. :-)  I don't know as much about the SSE situation, but
the AltiVec extensions to C have been added to several other compilers
and in real-world use for a while now, so there is an existing code base
to consider.

Kumar has kindly provided the URLs to Motorola's spec; is there something
similar for SSE that we can look at?  Also, are there any other vector
extension specs worth looking at?  (Doesn't Mips have something?)

Stan