On 23-dec-03, at 19:56, Matt Austern wrote:
And remember the downside if we don't introduce the Motorola syntax:
Altivec code won't be portable between the various compilers that all
claim to support Altivec. That's a very serious problem, and it's
exactly
what standards are supposed to prevent.
Hey, the Motorola AltiVec PIM does not support 64-bit PowerPC at all;
in fact, it requires incompatible changes to sanely support it.
There is a real need for a new, better, C binding for VMX; I for sure
don't care for compatibility with the Motorola AltiVec PIM at all,
as it is very very awkward to use (in fact, the _only_ thing that
it buys over writing real assembly is register allocation, and for
that you have to write casts almost everywhere -- I prefer to stay
with handwriting assembly (or having the compiler auto-vectorize
stuff of course)).
All in all, I think we would do better to learn from the mistakes
in the Motorola AltiVec PIM and start over.