Deprecate 32-bits HP-PA for GCC 4.8?

[Steven Bosscher <stevenb dot gcc at gmail dot com>]

Hello,

GCC is well into stage 1 for GCC 4.8, but I haven't seen any proposals
for targets to be deprecated. I have one I would like to put on the
list, so here's something to start a discussion with:

Deprecate all support for 32-bits HP-PA. This includes HP-UX10, and
PA-7000 and older.


To name a few reasons:

1. Support for the last production release (HP-UX 10.20) ended on June
30, 2003. That will be 10 years ago by the time GCC 4.9 will be
released. The only target architecture supported for HP-UX 10 is
HP-PA. I think it's reasonable to assume that most users of HP-UX10 on
machines with PA-RISC 2.0 support will have upgraded to HP-UX 11.11 or
later.

2. HP-UX 10 is also the last target that only supports SJLJ exceptions.

3. The PA-7000 series only run HP-UX 10 or earlier, so support for
HP-7000 and older is pointless without HP-UX10 support.

4. 32-bits HP-PA uses the SOM binary object format, i.e. it is a
non-ELF target (64-bits HP-PA is ELF).

Removing support for anything older than PA-8000 results in a
considerable cleanup for the PA architecture: ~3300 lines out of
~23000, estimated by cleaning all "!TARGET_64BIT" and "TARGET_PA_11"
patterns in pa.md and pa.c, and most of the cleanups to remove support
for SOM objects.

The resulting PA port would support HP-UX11 on 64bits PA-RISC 2.0
(i.e. HP-PA8xxx).


It's hard enough to maintain HP-UX11 support on HP-PA. With this
cleanup, the job would become a bit simpler.

Thoughts/comments?

Ciao!
Steven