On 12/12/2012 11:07 PM, David Brown wrote:
On 12/12/12 20:54, Robert Dewar wrote:
On 12/12/2012 2:52 PM, Steven Bosscher wrote:
And as usual: If you use an almost 30 years old architecture, why
would you need the latest-and-greatest compiler technology?
Seriously...
Well the embedded folk often end up with precisely this dichotomy :-)
True enough.
But if no sign of 386 embedded chips, then reasonable to deprecate
I agree.
I believe it has been a very long time since any manufacturers made a pure 386
chip. While I've
never used x86 devices in any of my embedded systems, I believe there are two
main classes of x86
embedded systems - those that use DOS (these still exist!), and those that aim
to be a small PC
with more modern x86 OS's. For the DOS systems, gcc does not matter, because
it is not used -
It is used (http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/). However 386 is not really supported
any more for DJGPP
for rather long time. I do not have corresponding hardware to test on 386
already for a long time
so I did not do any testing on 386 when I built recent GCC versions for DJGPP
for DJ FTP server
(last is gcc-4.7.2). As far as I remember read in mailing list 386 support no
more work (at least
C++ standard library). So I guess deprecating 386 could be not too large loss.
compilers like OpenWatcom are far more common (ref. the FreeDOS website). And
for people looking
for "embedded PC's", the processor is always going to be a lot more modern than
the 386 - otherwise
they are not going to be able to run any current OS.
Andris
