Re: Alpha vs. new ABI

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

Jeff> Isn't that the reason gcj now enforces a minimum of ptr
Jeff> alignment on the data member of arrays?  I know Alex made that
Jeff> change for the new ABI, but I don't remember exactly why.

I didn't realize a change had been made here recently.  Alex, what
gives?

>> In the runtime we could implement this by putting
>> __attribute__((aligned (something))) on the `data' field.
>> `something' would be chosen to be maximal alignment for the platform.
>> Maybe just `8' would suffice for now.

Jeff> That'll waste 4 bytes on x86.

Interesting -- I didn't realize that doubles only had to be aligned on
a 4 byte boundary there.

Last time this came up people seemed indifferent to the space wasted
by forcing maximal alignment for every array.  Maybe another 4 bytes
doesn't matter.

Of course if it is easy I'd prefer to find a solution that does the
right thing on each platform.  I don't know if you can use
`__alignof__' inside an attribute though.

Jeff> Whatever the case, the alignment specified in array.h should
Jeff> _exactly_ match the behavior in the frontend.  Right now it
Jeff> doesn't.

Definitely.  And I think we need to fix this before gcc 3.0, since it
is the only thing keeping the alpha port from working.  Alex said
today that he'd look into it.

Tom