Steven Bosscher wrote:
All of this feels (to me anyway) like adding a lot of code to the middle end to support MEP specific arch features. I understand it is in the mission statement that more ports is a goal for GCC, but I wonder if this set of changes is worth the maintenance burden...
FWIW, it sounds to me like this feature may also be useful for current iterations of the ARM NEON extension (which we're planning to submit support for quite soon). NEON supports various operations on DImode quantities, but we don't use them for normal code at present because moving values from NEON back to ARM core registers is relatively slow, so we want to avoid doing that as far as possible.
So, if there was a way of specifying that a particular value should be kept in a NEON register, that'd be a good thing, I think.
Cheers, Julian
