Re: MS/CW-style inline assembly for GCC

[Matt Austern <austern at apple dot com>]

On May 4, 2004, at 9:33 AM, David Edelsohn wrote:

> > > > > > Matt Austern writes:
>
> Matt> I don't think we want to emulate all of these things, which means
> Matt> that not all code will be directly portable from MSVC to gcc.  
> Maybe
> Matt> this means that "MS/CW-style" is a bad name for what we're trying
> Matt> to do.  Perhaps a better name would just be: more natural syntax
> Matt> for inline assembly.  There will be a large common subset between
> Matt> the new gcc inline assembly syntax and MSVC inline assembly
> Matt> syntax, but not an expectation that it will be wart-for-wart 
> identical.
>
> 	If this new MS/CW-like syntax is not well defined, the GCC
> community is going to be saddled with lots of bug reports.  Even with 
> good
> documentation, many users are going to try MS/CW-style inlined assembly
> and complain about differences.  Telling the users "works as expected" 
> may
> not endear GCC to those users.
>
> 	I am not arguing against supporting that syntax.  We need to be
> consider how users will approach this new feature.

I agree.  You're arguing that this syntax should be clearly documented, 
that
we should say exactly what it is and what works, and that documenting 
it as
"well, it's just like MS/CW except when it isn't" isn't good enough.  I 
agree
with that argument.  (It's one I'd like to see applied more broadly, 
but that's
a rant for another day.)

			--Matt