Re: HPUX C++ ABI

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Matt Austern wrote:

> On Thursday, September 12, 2002, at 09:19 PM, Kumar Gala wrote:
> 
> >> But speaking seriously, we Appleites deal with corporate pressure
> >> to support various hacks by maintaining our own version of GCC and
> >> taking on all the costs that go with that, so I'm wondering why it
> >> is that HP can't do the same.  While I personally don't have a problem
> >> doing a little favor for HP, it's going to be really tricky to avoid
> >> charges of favoritism and bias later on if, say, some Apple feature is
> >> shot down.
> >
> > I have to agree that this is very slippery slope.  What stops from 
> > extend this to programming models like the AltiVec PIM.  Currently GCC 
> > supports its own variant of the PIM while all other compilers that 
> > implement the specified PIM.

All other compilers being exactly how many, out of the population of 
cross-platform compilers?

I'm guessing 2 others.

You make it seem like their are *tons* of altivec PIM implementing 
compilers, and GCC is just the one exception.

> >
> > While making GCC support the AltiVec PIM may introduce code into 
> > places that are required only to support the PIM, it would be more 
> > generally useful to the user base.
> >
> > Apple obviously ships a modified GCC that supports the spec'd PIM.  I 
> > would be really nice if users could have code that worked under Linux 
> > as well as Mac OS X.
> 
> We'd be completely in favor of that, of course.
And if they want it, they can use the generic vector infrastructure, and 
not worry about the Altivec PIM at all.

In fact, they'll get code that works on x86 too.
What a deal!

--Dan