Matthias Klose <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > As Chris (currently listed as package maintainer for gcc alpha) > seems to be away, I'll ask on debian-alpha (Falk?), if this patch > should be included.
I'd vote for not including it like it is now. > > Richard Henderson (the Alpha fellow from Red Hat) said he wouldn't > > accept it into the general GCC unless all users of GCC (i.e. BSD, > > etc) came forward and said they wanted it. > > > > He also gave three reasons why he personally didn't like it: > > 1- The default under DEC C is to not IEEE compliance > > 2- IEEE compliance leads to 'severe' performance penalties > > 3- The vast majority of SIGFPEs are due to unitialized data reads > > > > While one and three might be true (timing tests show that two is > > just plain wrong), Well, 20% looks pretty severe to me. > > they miss the point of the patch. > > > > The patch is intended to help achieve the goal of having as many > > packages as possible run on the Debian Alpha distribution as > > possible (without needing to specify Alpha specific flags). Then we should also compile with -O0 to avoid triggering bugs? There has to be some trade-off. > > This means matching the GNU defaults on the other Debian > > architectures, and that just happens to be IEEE compliant > > libraries and code. It has also been a GNU policy to not be standards compliant just for the sake of it. Very little code actually needs IEEE complicance. Like rth, I'd say as a minimum -ffast-math should turn off IEEE complicance. When that's the case, the patch would be OK with me, since actually also very little code needs high floating point performance. -- Falk