On 20 June 2012 01:50, Alex Rønne Petersen <[email protected]> wrote: > On 19-06-2012 23:22, Manu wrote: > >> On 19 June 2012 23:59, deadalnix <[email protected] >> >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> Le 19/06/2012 22:08, Iain Buclaw a écrit : >> >> From what I gathered from further discussion, it made sense for >> embedded platforms, such as ARM, but not x86. >> >> >> It has proven to be useful to me, not only for performances reasons, >> but also for low level manipulations. >> >> It don't see what make ARM that different on regard to inline >> assembly capabilities. >> >> >> If you had the register alias feature I described above, would you be >> ale to write such low-level manipulations using intrinsics? >> I think I would be able to rewrite all x86 asm blocks I've ever written >> using that feature. >> >> ARM and PPC both have unique features relating to their branch control >> and branch prediction that x86 doesn't have. Sadly, all high level >> languages COMPLETELY overlook such features when designing high level >> expressions, because they are traditionally designed for x86 first. >> > > To be fair, ARM v8/AArch64 has eliminated predicated execution, simply > because it turned out that the complexity of writing languages and > compilers for it was not worth it, compared to just having good branch > prediction.
I suspect it may have been because C didn't have expressions to support it, and D... ;) Shame though, it's a totally awesome hardware feature. I don't know of any mass-market arm-v8 devices yet. arm-v7 is still very much alive, and will exist for many years yet.
