Re: Proposal for merging scalar-storage-order branch into mainline

[Jeff Law <law at redhat dot com>]

On 06/26/2015 01:56 AM, Richard Biener wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 7:03 PM, Jeff Law <law@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 06/09/2015 10:20 AM, Eric Botcazou wrote:
> > > > Because some folks don't want to audit their code to where to add
> > > > byteswaps.
> > > > I am serious people have legacy big-endian code they want to run little
> > > > endian. There is a reason this is around in the first place. Developers
> > > > are
> > > > lazy.
> > >
> > >
> > > That's a little rough, but essentially correct in our experience.
> >
> > Agreed on both points.  These legacy codebases can be large and full
> > auditing may not really be that feasible.
>
> Well - they need a full audit anyway to slap those endian attributes on the
> appropriate structures.  We are not, after all, introducing a -fbig-endian
> switch.
The cases I'm aware of would *love* a -fbig-endian switch :-)


> "Legacy code base" and "new compiler feature" don't mix in my mind.
Assume the legacy platform didn't use GCC (because GCC wasn't a viable 
option way back when the now legacy platform was state-of-the-art), 
while the new platform will use GCC and will have an endianness change. 
 In that case features to ease the pain of migration make a goodly 
amount of sense.

jeff