On Nov 24, 2010, at 9:37 PM, Dave Korn wrote:
> On 24/11/2010 21:31, Joern Rennecke wrote:
>> ...
>> We can add the generator program when we (re-) add a word addressed
>> target, or add a bit addressed one.
>
> I do think that this goal is not so far off that we should actually
> encourage new code to break it. I built gcc 4.5.0 based on a 24-bit word size
> recently, just in order to get the driver to work and the actual compiler
> itself to successfully init itself and compile an empty file without crashing,
> and that proved entirely practical, so we might not be so far off as one might
> assume. That shows that the core is already substantially independent from
> the target, I think, and that we could go further with that independence.
How much interest is there in having this sort of thing work? Indeed we had
32-bit unit targets in the recent past, but no more. Non 8 bit per unit is
longer ago, probably; the pdp10 port is an example but that's way back on 2.95.
Just to play around I'm trying to see if gcc will compile for a 60 bit target
with 6 bit units. The answer is that it will not as it stands, though the
changes necessary to make it do basic things like "a=b;" are actually quite
small.
paul
