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Re: Deprecating ARM FPA support (was: ARM Neon Tests Failing on non-Neon Target)
On Sun, 2010-05-23 at 23:15 +0200, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> > Martin Guy wrote:
> >
> >> Dropping FPA support from GCC effectively makes the OABI unusable, and
> >> often we are forced to use that by the environment supplied to us. Are
> >> there significant advantages to removing FPA support, other than
> >> reducing the size of the ARM backend?
> >
> > I think that maintainability of the ARM backend is indeed the major
> > benefit to dropping it.
>
> There are lots of other ports that could be dropped to improve
> maintainability of some backends, or even the whole of GCC. That has
> never been accepted as a good reason to drop anything if there are
> still users of it, no matter how few (see pdp11 / vax backends,
> osf/tru64 support, other random unmaintained backends, ...).
>
> What is different about arm-elf?
>
What's different is that there is a well-maintained arm-eabi port. The
arm-elf port and all its legacy just gets in the way.
The vax back-end only affects VAX; likewise for the PDP11 port.
I think it's critical that we don't let the tail wag the dog here.
R.