Re: Deprecate i386 for GCC 4.8?

[Andris Pavenis <andris dot pavenis at iki dot fi>]

On 12/12/2012 11:07 PM, David Brown wrote:
> On 12/12/12 20:54, Robert Dewar wrote:
> > On 12/12/2012 2:52 PM, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> >
> > > And as usual: If you use an almost 30 years old architecture, why
> > > would you need the latest-and-greatest compiler technology?
> > > Seriously...
> >
> > Well the embedded folk often end up with precisely this dichotomy :-)
>
> True enough.
>
> > But if no sign of 386 embedded chips, then reasonable to deprecate
> > I agree.
>
> I believe it has been a very long time since any manufacturers made a pure 386 chip.  While I've
> never used x86 devices in any of my embedded systems, I believe there are two main classes of x86
> embedded systems - those that use DOS (these still exist!), and those that aim to be a small PC
> with more modern x86 OS's.  For the DOS systems, gcc does not matter, because it is not used -

It is used (http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/). However 386 is not really supported any more for DJGPP
for rather long time. I do not have corresponding hardware to test on 386 already for a long time
so I did not do any testing on 386 when I built recent GCC versions for DJGPP for DJ FTP server
(last is gcc-4.7.2). As far as I remember read in mailing list 386 support no more work (at least
C++ standard library). So I guess deprecating 386 could be not too large loss.

> compilers like OpenWatcom are far more common (ref. the FreeDOS website).  And for people looking
> for "embedded PC's", the processor is always going to be a lot more modern than the 386 - otherwise
> they are not going to be able to run any current OS.

Andris