On Mon, 2010-05-24 at 12:42 +0200, Steven Bosscher wrote: > On 5/24/10, Richard Earnshaw <rearn...@arm.com> wrote: > > > > On Sun, 2010-05-23 at 23:15 +0200, Steven Bosscher wrote: > >> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Mark Mitchell <m...@codesourcery.com> > >> wrote: > >> > Martin Guy wrote: > >> > > >> >> Dropping FPA support from GCC effectively makes the OABI unusable, and > >> >> often we are forced to use that by the environment supplied to us. Are > >> >> there significant advantages to removing FPA support, other than > >> >> reducing the size of the ARM backend? > >> > > >> > I think that maintainability of the ARM backend is indeed the major > >> > benefit to dropping it. > >> > >> There are lots of other ports that could be dropped to improve > >> maintainability of some backends, or even the whole of GCC. That has > >> never been accepted as a good reason to drop anything if there are > >> still users of it, no matter how few (see pdp11 / vax backends, > >> osf/tru64 support, other random unmaintained backends, ...). > >> > >> What is different about arm-elf? > >> > > > > What's different is that there is a well-maintained arm-eabi port. The > > arm-elf port and all its legacy just gets in the way. > > > > Imho you are taking a too narrow view here, because... > > > The vax back-end only affects VAX; likewise for the PDP11 port. > > ...all this legacy just gets in the way of gcc as a whole. So I still > don't see the difference. >
To a degree, yes, you are right. However, the source for all that port is in separate files. For the ARM port this is all necessarily in one place. > Nb, I don't oppose deprecating any arm stuff, but I just would like to > know if the justification also applies to other backends/ports. > Patched from me and others were rejected in the past even though the > situation was similar. Under what criteria would such patches now get > support from the RMs? > Can't really answer that one. I don't remember the case; and anyway, it's not me that gets to decide... R
