Re: New back end ia16: 16-bit Intel x86

[rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Ross Ridge)]

Michael Matz writes:
> Blaeh, that's all ugly.  I actually think that ia16 is a reasonable name 
>for this ISA, even though Rask just made it up.

I think "ia16" is an ugly backformation and being made up like this
there's a risk of it conflicting with something else in the future.

>It's generating code for the 16 bit mode (which works on all the intel
>CPUs) which for all practical measures is a different CPU architecture
>than the same chip in 32bit or 64bit mode (it just happens to share some
>mnemonics and insn encodings).

That's absurd.  By sharing the same instruction set and registers, for
"all practical measures" it is the same CPU architecture.  There's a
bigger difference between 32-bit and 64-bit mode and GCC doesn't treat the
x86_64 as a different architecture.  Ideally a 16-bit IA-32 port should
be merged into the i386 port, just like the x86_64 port.  Given the
limitations of Rask Ingemann Lambertsen's port I'm not entirely sure
why it wasn't, though I can see some good reasons for keeping it seperate.

					Ross Ridge