New, experimental GPC version (pentium-gpc)

Mon, 19 May 1997 14:10:58 +0100 (WET DST)

Hello all,

I have something for the daring folks among you: a GPC, based on the
latest Cygnus CDK snapshot. For those of you who don't know, the Cygnus
snapshots are GCC development releases, so you could consider this to be a
pre-2.8 GCC. I used GPC-alpha 970510.

I tested it on linux and SGI irix and had no problems with it (yet).
Now, GPC alpha releases are usually quite reliable, but this is a major
change in code, so you could consider this _REALLY ALPHA_ ;-)

It can do some cool things like pentium(pro) optimizations.
I would love to hear from somebody who does lots of floating point on a
pentium(pro) whether it's really is faster.

Binaries for pentiumpro-intel·linux (RedHat 4.1) and mips-sgi-irix6.2 are
available. The mips binary is not targeting 64bits because of the
immaturity of mips64 support in GCC.

The linux binary installs in /opt/cdkgpc-i970518. You can move it around,
just make sure you don't install it over your existing GCC.

URL: ftp://agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de/home/janjaap/cygnus-970507


Apart from numerous "easy fixes" and manual patching, these changes were
necessary because of changes in GCC internals:

gpc-decl.c:	build_complex(): extra argument.

setop.c: clear_storage(): New last argument. Probably clear blocksize.
	set to 1. Not most efficient, but works.

gpc-cccp.c: quick hacks to add:
	int c89
	UCHAR is_space


Known bugs:
(1) "automake" is completely broken. Still looking for a fancy solution that
enables us to share the `gcc' driver with GCC.  
(2) Some files not modified but reused from 2.7.2.x: gpc-cccp.c, gpc-lex.c

Todo:
All cygwin32 related patches were removed from GPC and must be put back in.
Must check for cygwin32-beta18 compatibility. *maybe* do a djgpp version.


BTW: I don't plan to maintain a seperate Cygnus CDK GPC source tree. You
could consider this a techdemo: the effort and results will pay off once
GCC 2.8 is released, because porting GPC will be much easier then.

Happy hacking!

JanJaap

---
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going
to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly
overhead.  -- RFC1925.

Jan-Jaap van der Heijden (janjaap@Wit381304.student.utwente.nl)