Hi Luis,
On 06/02/18 15:04, Luis Machado wrote:
Thanks for the feedback Kyrill. I've adjusted the v2 patch based on your
suggestions and re-tested the changes. Everything is still sane.
Thanks! This looks pretty good to me.
Since this is ARM-specific and fairly specific, i wonder if it would be
reasonable to consider it for inclusion at the current stage.
It is true that the target maintainers can choose to take
such patches at any stage. However, any patch at this stage increases
the risk of regressions being introduced and these regressions
can come bite us in ways that are very hard to anticipate.
Have a look at some of the bugs in bugzilla (or a quick scan of the
gcc-bugs list)
for examples of the ways that things can go wrong with any of the myriad
of GCC components
and the unexpected ways in which they can interact.
For example, I am now working on what I initially thought was a
one-liner fix for
PR 84164 but it has expanded into a 3-patch series with a midend
component and
target-specific changes for 2 ports.
These issues are very hard to catch during review and normal testing,
and can sometimes take months of deep testing by
fuzzing and massive codebase rebuilds to expose, so the closer the
commit is to a release
the higher the risk is that an obscure edge case will be unnoticed and
unfixed in the release.
So the priority at this stage is to minimise the risk of destabilising
the codebase,
as opposed to taking in new features and desirable performance
improvements (like your patch!)
That is the rationale for delaying committing such changes until the start
of GCC 9 development. But again, this is up to the aarch64 maintainers.
I'm sure the patch will be a perfectly fine and desirable commit for GCC 9.
This is just my perspective as maintainer of the arm port.