This is the mail archive of the
gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org
mailing list for the GCC project.
Re: New back end ia16: 16-bit Intel x86
- From: rridge at csclub dot uwaterloo dot ca (Ross Ridge)
- To: gcc-patches at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:44:56 -0400 (EDT)
- Subject: Re: New back end ia16: 16-bit Intel x86
Michael Matz writes:
> Blaeh, that's all ugly. I actually think that ia16 is a reasonable name
>for this ISA, even though Rask just made it up.
I think "ia16" is an ugly backformation and being made up like this
there's a risk of it conflicting with something else in the future.
>It's generating code for the 16 bit mode (which works on all the intel
>CPUs) which for all practical measures is a different CPU architecture
>than the same chip in 32bit or 64bit mode (it just happens to share some
>mnemonics and insn encodings).
That's absurd. By sharing the same instruction set and registers, for
"all practical measures" it is the same CPU architecture. There's a
bigger difference between 32-bit and 64-bit mode and GCC doesn't treat the
x86_64 as a different architecture. Ideally a 16-bit IA-32 port should
be merged into the i386 port, just like the x86_64 port. Given the
limitations of Rask Ingemann Lambertsen's port I'm not entirely sure
why it wasn't, though I can see some good reasons for keeping it seperate.
Ross Ridge