Re: MS/CW-style inline assembly for GCC

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> Richard Henderson <rth@redhat.com> writes:
>
>
> > Well, with this description it would seem that you could directly
> > convert CW asms into GCC asms, and thus you would have no impact
> > on anything outside the parser.  With that as a premise, I have no
> > objection (as a backend guy) to CW support being added to the FSF
> > compiler.
>
> If it is really true that only the parser would have to change, then
> it seems to me that CW asm could be converted into gcc asm using a
> separate tool which simply rewrote the file.  It would have to do
> simple C/C++ parsing, but I think not full parsing.  Such a tool would
> be useful as a conversion aid, and with some specs hackery could also
> be invoked directly by the Darwin compiler.
You're not the first person to suggest the separate tool idea! It
would have to know types and decls well enough to come up with the
right constraint letters. Take a look at MacMAME sources to see
some hairy usage of CW inline asm; much of it is assembled from
combinations of macros.

Stan