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Re: traditional mips vs. little endian?
- To: Eric Christopher <echristo at redhat dot com>
- Subject: Re: traditional mips vs. little endian?
- From: Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at cygnus dot com>
- Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2001 12:07:32 -0400
- Cc: cgd at broadcom dot com, "H . J . Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>, binutils at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- References: <yov5vgkk234z.fsf@highland.sibyte.com> <20010722122158.A30063@lucon.org> <yov5n15wvi35.fsf@highland.sibyte.com> <20010722192915.A18268@lucon.org> <996565816.2316.12.camel@ghostwheel.cygnus.com> <yov5g0bcakr8.fsf@highland.sibyte.com> <996659488.32593.34.camel@ghostwheel.cygnus.com>
> I was thinking changing the default abi, but your arguments are
> compelling...
I'm guessing your meaning for things like mips-elf and the like.
>>
>> * making the test-case consistent w/ the configury as it is now, or
>>
>> * Making only IRIX use the SGI ABI ('non-traditional'), and move all
>> existing non-os-specific 'embedded' targets (incl. mips-elf and
>> mipsel-elf) over to 'traditional mips' (or worse, even the non-IRIX
>> OS-specific ones)?
>>
>>
>> I don't really like latter choice, but don't _deeply_ care either.
>> Certainly it would make things more consistent, but is it really
>> desirable to change the ABI and configuration in use for ... who knows
>> how long, for those targets?
>
>
> Good point. I'd like to use a different ABI by default, but I'm not
> sure what the deal would be with breaking all of the previous. Does
> anyone have any advice here?
This feels a bit like replacing history with flavor of the month.
Remember that changing the ABI/tuple/... and how they are all
interpreted affects things starting at the compiler and going right
through to the debugger.
More importantly, it affects the users (well my type of user :-) and
their expectations. I don't think users are going to be happy if things
as entrenched as an ABI, for their target, changes between each release.
Perhaphs the question to ask is: is this being done for technical or
asthetic reasons?
Glad it isn't my decision.
enjoy,
Andrew