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

news
Jun 14, 20061 min

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. 😉