Re: Target-specific Front-Ends? (Was: front end changes foraltivec)

[Ira Ruben <ira@apple.com>]

At 9:47 AM -0800 11/27/01, Stan Shebs wrote:

>Easy - Motorola wasn't going to be able to sell G4s to either
>Linux or embedded users (VxWorks etc) without having AltiVec
>support in GCC.  It speaks volumes that nobody at Motorola seemed
>to be aware that GCC was Wind River's standard compiler, and
>that it thus might be a good idea to talk to GCC people about the
>proposed extension.
>
>...
>
>Nevertheless, I still think it was a mistake.  When it comes to
>messing with the language, we often need to say "no" to users, who
>typically don't understand the consequences of tinkering with language
>syntax and semantics - indeed, they're paying us to be the experts.
>While it may have been easy to do in MrC, did anybody consider that
>the extension was going to affect every other PowerPC compiler in
>the world?  Ironically, this extension makes our internal version of
>GCC more complicated and time-consuming to merge with FSF sources, so
>our imports take longer and have more problems, which means that your
>own daily work today has been made more difficult by the expedient
>choice of several years ago.

I'm not going to get into a debate with you about design decisions of 
the past when you weren't there and don't know the context in which 
those were made.  It may be your opinion about how "hard" it is to 
support "vector" this way.  I do not agree.  If it was so easy for 
MrC[pp] and I assume Mcc and MW I do not see a problem with gcc.

Ira