On 5/24/10, Richard Earnshaw <rearn...@arm.com> wrote: > > On Sun, 2010-05-23 at 23:15 +0200, Steven Bosscher wrote: >> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Mark Mitchell <m...@codesourcery.com> >> wrote: >> > Martin Guy wrote: >> > >> >> Dropping FPA support from GCC effectively makes the OABI unusable, and >> >> often we are forced to use that by the environment supplied to us. Are >> >> there significant advantages to removing FPA support, other than >> >> reducing the size of the ARM backend? >> > >> > I think that maintainability of the ARM backend is indeed the major >> > benefit to dropping it. >> >> There are lots of other ports that could be dropped to improve >> maintainability of some backends, or even the whole of GCC. That has >> never been accepted as a good reason to drop anything if there are >> still users of it, no matter how few (see pdp11 / vax backends, >> osf/tru64 support, other random unmaintained backends, ...). >> >> What is different about arm-elf? >> > > What's different is that there is a well-maintained arm-eabi port. The > arm-elf port and all its legacy just gets in the way. >
Imho you are taking a too narrow view here, because... > The vax back-end only affects VAX; likewise for the PDP11 port. ...all this legacy just gets in the way of gcc as a whole. So I still don't see the difference. Nb, I don't oppose deprecating any arm stuff, but I just would like to know if the justification also applies to other backends/ports. Patched from me and others were rejected in the past even though the situation was similar. Under what criteria would such patches now get support from the RMs? > I think it's critical that we don't let the tail wag the dog here. Don't know what this means... Ciao! Steven
