Hi Rainer,
> On 16 Jun 2026, at 09:10, Rainer Orth <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Tested on aarch64-darwin (and testing now on aarch64-linux),
>> OK for trunk (assuming the Linux tests pass)?
>
> as I've said before, I very much like the syntax, but ...
>
>> The motivation for this is that it is not unusal for subtargets to have
>> substantially equivalent code-gen but differing in details. This provision
>> avoid duplication of the common sections.
>>
>> Viz:
>> // { dg-final { check-function-bodies {"**" "*E"} "*/" "" { target { !
>> *-*-darwin* } } {\.L[0-9]+} } }
>> // { dg-final { check-function-bodies {"**" "*M"} "*/" "" { target
>> *-*-darwin* } {\.L[0-9]+} } }
>
> ... this is going the wrong direction IMO: this will be duplicated into
> every test that needs different prefixes. The testsuite is already
> riddled with such duplication, and I'd rather see it reduced than
> increase it.
>
>> This says that body scan lines can begin with either ** or *E for ELF targets
>> (or pecoff, I guess)
>> but that Darwin targets should scan for either ** or *M.
>
> Imagine (which I think is plausible) that PE-COFF support is really
> added: this would make the default (ELF) case ever harder to read, apart
> from having to modify this section in every single test involved.
>
> If the multiple prefix support were moved into check-function-bodies
> instead, all this would simply vanish, improving both readability and
> maintainablity. Witness Richard's change to patch to move the explicit
> dg-add-options check_function_bodies into dg-final.
I agree with all of this, in principle;
my residual objections are:
- it means that the process of adding a change to deal with a new test
granularity now means editing a file in testsuite/lib instead of making a
change local to one specific test.
- it hides the meaning of the prefixes away outside the actual test (meaning
that one has to look in two places to understand the intent).
- We will probably still have cases where the code-gen is so dissimilar between
targets that multiple match blocks would be needed. I’d done that so far
with
a different terminator for each case .. but perhaps it would work just
retaining
‘*/‘ at the expense of a little less readability of the match blocks.
that said, none ot those are show-stoppers for me …
> I also think that this is doable without too much churn:
>
> * Move the functionality into check-function-bodies, always applying it.
>
> * Given that only some of the AVR tests (28 total) use a prefix other
> than "**" ("** ") for some unknown reason, change those tests to also
> use "**" like everyone else.
well, I’d guess that just means adding “** “ to the config content for avr.
> * Then, in check-function-bodies the explicit PREFIX arg can simply be
> ignored (or rather checked that that it's "**" as in all tests so
> far) and replaced by the magic above.
>
> I think this would be a large win for everyone with manageable
> complexity.
Sure, I don’t think that the change to the patch is a big deal - it’s just a
question of how we want it to look to the end-user (who is perhaps not
so quick to want to edit the core testsuite code).
thanks
Iain
>
> As a follow-up, mostly mechanical, one could remove the explicit PREFIX
> from the tests, relying on the default instead.
>
> Thoughts? I'd especially like Mike's and Richard's opinions on this.
>
> Rainer
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University
