On Tue, 8 Nov 2011, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote: > (yes, that's you cue. :) For acceptance, IMHO better get it > working universally by open-coding the implementation without > requiring --enable-* options.
Making something involving new types - and so ABI impact - universal without actually agreeing the ABI for each target with appropriate ABI maintainers or interest groups for that target is not a good idea. It leads to ABI incompatibility with other compilers, and to inefficient and poorly specified ABIs that are "whatever GCC happens to implement if you don't think about it" like we have on several targets for complex types.... (I spent quite some time reverse engineering and documenting the peculiarities of the ABIs for 32-bit Power GNU/Linux that arose in that way; now documented in the Power.org ABI specification.) (It is however desirable that supporting fixed point or decimal floating point for a new target ought not to require more from that target than appropriate definitions of the ABI.) -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
