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Re: Target-specific Front-Ends? (Was: front end changes foraltivec)
- From: Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>
- To: Ziemowit Laski <zlaski at apple dot com>, "Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>
- Cc: "gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org" <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 14:30:33 -0800
- Subject: Re: Target-specific Front-Ends? (Was: front end changes foraltivec)
> But is there any harm in INCLUDING them in the tree?
Yes. Absolutely every byte in the tree has a cost: we have to remember
what it's there for, where it's used, where it's not, and if anything
else changes that might affect it, we have to know about it, so that
we can fix it too, or at least consciously break it, rather than
unconsciously.
And if the answer is "It's OK, you can break it without thinking about
it" then it should just be a local patch in somebody else's tree.
That said the Altivec programming extensions are widely used at this
point, and I'm not sure how reasonable it is for us to say that we
want to support this stuff in some other way, even if we don't like
the way it was done. (I don't.)
Concretely, the Altivec specification allows "vector" to be either a
macro, or a context-sensitive keyword. The latter is a much better
choice, and it is the one we should adopt in GCC. It will be far
less intrusive.
Other things are more difficult. Vector literals should just be
C99 compound literals, but I'm not sure whether we can get away
with changing that or not.
--
Mark Mitchell mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC http://www.codesourcery.com