MS/CW-style inline assembly for GCC

[Andrew Pinski]

On May 4, 2004, at 15:00, Stan Shebs wrote:
>
> That's why I said "were" poorly documented - it's much better than
> it used to be.
>
> It's still kind of mysterious to developers though; for instance in
> the PowerPC case, sometimes you have to use "b" and other times "r"
> for a register, because r0 is not a "base register" and can't be used
> in all the same contexts. Worse, the mistaken choice of "r" may not
> bite immediately, depending on how the phase of the moon is affecting
> register allocation, then manifests itself as a assembler complaint
> about a register not mentioned in the source code. After a couple
> experiences like that, developers spew all over us about GCC's
> lameness and go back to CodeWarrior. :-)

But this is a documentation defect for rs6000 rather than a defect in 
the style.
I386's documentation for their constraints are hugely better than 
rs6000.
But then again if the person who is writing the asm does not know if the
register should be an address base register or not, they should not be 
writing the
asm in the first place as they would get it wrong even if the 
constrains for
rs6000 are better documented and most likely the inline-asm which you 
are providing
with the CW/MS style of inline asm will not produce optimal code or 
unless you
actually parse the asm and know what each instruction takes.  If that 
is done
then you are going to integrate gas into GCC or even better just update 
the
current binutils so that it can assemble into mach-o object files and 
the other
targets where GNU binutils does not work right?

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski