Re: MS/CW-style inline assembly for GCC

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

After reading through this thread, I think this should stay an 
Apple-local patch, despite the fact that there is clearly utility to 
some potential users from this patch.

Here are the reasons that I believe that:

(1) The argument that "Apple people will maintain this" is 
insufficient.  GCC features have a strong, long tradition of being 
cross-platform, and I find it hard to believe that Apple will 
indefinitely solve all problems relating to this feature on all 
platforms.  There should be widespread buy-in from the broader GCC 
community before we take on a new feature.  In general, I don't think we 
should ever take a feature because one party promises to maintain it; 
the world is just too unpredictable.  We should take features because 
they're broadly useful.

(2) We already have inline assembly.  When we have two ways of doing 
something, then we have to worry about consistency between them, 
additional documentation, etc., etc.  As has been suggested, it would 
seem better to improve the documentation and/or code for the current 
version.  If this were purely a syntactic extension that would be one 
thing (i.e., if the new syntax could be mapped directly on to the old 
syntax in a simple, platform-independent way), but that is not the case.

(3) Some of our most experienced contributors have expressed deep 
reservations, based on prior implementation experience, relating to this 
feature.

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
(916) 791-8304
mark@codesourcery.com