On 20-06-2012 21:08, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
On 20/06/12 18:10, David Nadlinger wrote:
I am not too sure about that: In my opinion, your description of the
problem
would be accurate if some compiler implemented asm {}, but with a
different
syntax or different semantics. But GDC simply does not (resp. will not)
implement D-style inline assembly at all. From my point of view, this
is not
necessarily a problem spec-wise, as it is not guaranteed to be
available – if it
was, there would be no reason to have D_InlineAsm_X86 at all.
Reading http://dlang.org/iasm.html I don't have the impression that the
inline assembler is an optional part of the D spec or not guaranteed to
be available -- it's very deliberately intended to be there.
Needless to say, inline assembly is sometimes a very convenient
feature to have,
but if it is the only issue stopping GDC from being merged to mainline
GCC, I'd
say the only sensible choice is to yank it, at least it for the time
being. If,
at a later point, somebody comes up with a clever way to implement it
given the
constraints imposed by the GCC infrastructure, or manages to convince
the GCC
maintainers to accept the »dirty« solution, it could still be added in
again.
For sure it make sense as a short-term compromise, but I don't see how
GDC can meet the D specifications without implementing the inline
assembler at some point in the (hopefully near) future. When you
consider that GDC is the best bet for being able to compile D on ARM
processors, and a major application here is embedded systems, it really
seems necessary to plan to have this functionality in there.
And x86 inline assembler... on ARM? I don't think I follow.
--
Alex Rønne Petersen
a...@lycus.org
http://lycus.org
