Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    David asked about this on the SC list, too, and I think it's an
    important question.  If we, as a community, decide to desupport a
    particular platform, that's fine.  In fact, the less we do the more
    successful we will be at what we do do.  I wouldn't mind dropping
    support for a lot of old targets.  

An important reason for keeping old targets around and basically working is
that they contain examples of different types of things a processor can have.
The more of these that are maintained, the easier it will be to port to
a new CPU because of the higher chance that something in that CPU will
have been seen (and hence dealt with) before.

The romp, in particular, is the first of a set of a "new" porting style for
RISC chips and, as such, is valuable even when the last such machine
goes away (I use one regularly, by the way, but don't try running GCC on
it very often).