bluesky idea: __attribute__ (netorder)

[Tim Hollebeek]

Richard Henderson writes ...
> 
> Take ppc for example: it has three relevant instructions, byte-swap
> load, store, and and a two-address in-register swap.  There is no
> way to write an inline asm that can take in to account both source
> and destination to choose which of these three instructions to use.
> 
> Of course, we could achieve the same optimization goals with a
> builtin function rather than a data attribute and it would be far
> less invasive.

One wonders, though, whether code that does enough byteswapping in
enough diverse locations to benefit from this sort of optimization is
suffering from poor design, and would be better served by redesign to
reduce the need for byteswapping, or localize the byteswapping and use
asms.

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Tim Hollebeek                           | "Everything above is a true
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