Enterprise Mac | Tom Yager » Red Hat 7:21: "Apple, borkest thou not thy ABI"

June 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Red Hat 7:21: "Apple, borkest thou not thy ABI"

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Every professional has a long scroll of "...never let an x do y" commandments. I took this from the tail of a July, 2005 exchange between two engineers from Apple and Red Hat (the latter in italics):

[snip gearhead stuff]...this doesn't fit neatly into gcc's model of two-valued flags; it's also a bit tricky to implement for the same reason.
Nah, you just remove it from target_flags, and control the two new variables from ix86_handle_option.

OK. Think that's the better approach?
Why do you want to make these sort of arbitrary changes to your ABI? I can't see what you win...

The compiler people are not driving this.
*shrug* It's not horrible, I guess. It preseves [sic] existing semantics when people use the switch; not that I'm a large fan of switches like this that bork the abi.

My preferred solution is that you don't allow non-compiler people to invent an ABI. ;-)

Posted by Tom Yager on June 14, 2006 01:04 PM

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