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Re: MS/CW-style inline assembly for GCC
On May 7, 2004, at 11:57 AM, Mark Mitchell wrote:
Dale Johannesen wrote:
On May 6, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Mark Mitchell wrote:
For me, compatibility is the number one priority. Ease of use comes
That's what I figured. :-)
So, let's take truth-and-beauty out of the discussion; this isn't
about a better technology. It might or might not be better, but
that's not the root of the issue. The bottom line is that Apple
wants CW syntax because it wants to convert existing CW users to GCC
users. To do that, it wants to be able to say "you can just
recompile your code" rathern than "you have to rewrite your code".
In fact, for all widely-used CW extensions, Apple would probably
like to see them in GCC. It's easy to see the Apple
product-marketing logic here.
I've been staying out of this since I'm of the "they should be
writing .s files" school, but
criticizing the idea *on these grounds* seems unreasonable.
I'm not criticizing the idea because it makes sense to Apple's
product-marketing people, and I'm certainly not trying to draw any
moral conclusion about Apple's desires. Doing what makes sense for
your company is what running a business is all about. My point was
only that I don't think that the primary motivation from Apple is that
this is a better assembly syntax; the primary motiviation is that it's
CW-compatible.
I don't think the two can be separated as simply as that. Apple is not
at all shy about telling our developers that they need to switch to
newer technology, *if* we think the new thing is better.
The trouble is that gcc is incompatible with CW and also, in their
opinion and ours, worse. We can't tell them that they should switch to
gcc's syntax because it's better; not with a straight face, anyway.
Any of our developers who look at the two side by side know it isn't.
If you can come up with an assembly syntax that's genuinely better than
CW's, and if we can convincingly tell our developers that it's better,
then we really will consider telling our developers they should convert
their code.
--Matt