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Re: Target ABIs with 16bit ints.


Hi,

On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Nathan Sidwell wrote:

> doc/portability.texi says
> 'The main goal of GCC was to make a good, fast compiler for machines in
> the class that the GNU system aims to run on: 32-bit machines that address
> 8-bit bytes and have several general registers.'

This statement doesn't conflict with anything.  First it's only stating an
intent not any state, and second it even only talks about the past.

> 'However, don't make any effort to cater to the possibility that an
> @code{int} will be less than 32 bits.  We don't support 16-bit machines
> in GNU.'

And this general guideline in the GNU coding standards also doesn't
necessarily apply to the compiler itself.  Sure, people who want to have
it working on funny architectures need to do the work on their own, but
that doesn't mean we should prevent them from doing so by discouraging
that.

> How many 16bit int abi targets do we have?

avr is 8bit or 16bit (command line).  m68k is 16 or 32 bit, dsp16xxx is 16
bit, mn10200 is 16 bit, m68hc11 is 16 or 32 bit, stormy16 is 16 bit, ip2k
is 8 bit.

> How important are they now? (Yes, I know the pdp11 /was/ important :)
> Should we deprecate them?

I don't think so.


Ciao,
Michael.


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