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Re: Target-specific Front-Ends? (Was: front end changes for altivec)
- From: Ziemowit Laski <zlaski at apple dot com>
- To: Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>
- Cc: Ira Ruben <ira at apple dot com>, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 18:05:56 -0800
- Subject: Re: Target-specific Front-Ends? (Was: front end changes for altivec)
On Tuesday, November 27, 2001, at 05:36 , Per Bothner wrote:
> Ziemowit Laski wrote:
>
>> No! :) The features were are talking about here are TARGET-SPECIFIC
>> and hence need not
>> be any more portable, well-defined, documented, etc., than the machine
>> descriptions
>> for those targets.
>
> Why would we want to put into our compiler a TARGET-SPECIFIC syntactic
> extension to handle the rather generic concept of a fixed-size vector?
> And why
> would we want to add a configure mechanism to do that?
Two words: LEGACY CODE.
>
> Let me answer for you: We don't.
>
> What we want is a *generic* machine-independent syntax, with optional
If we were designing AltiVec syntax today, I would absolutely agree.
But we're
not. We have a bunch of code, supported by a bunch of compilers
(including
Apple's gcc-2.95.2). Yes, it's ugly, but it's out there in the real
world.
> no problem. Feel free to maintain your own tree with whatever
> extensions
> you want - it's Free Software. But I will vote against any suggestion
> to
Well, we do have a local tree, and it is a royal pain to maintain in sync
with the FSF, as Stan can attest. :) In making my proposal, I assumed
(perhaps wrongly) that a lot of other organizations are in the same
boat --
i.e., they have local modifications that they wouldn't mind putting into
the FSF, but can't because GCC is not sufficiently modular (at least not
for the front-end things) and the local things can't be kept sufficiently
target-specific (hence interfering with the mainline).
--Zem
--------------------------------------------------------------
Ziemowit Laski Apple Computer, Inc.
zlaski@apple.com 2 Infinite Loop, MS 302-4SN
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