Hi,Speaking of the abi, they did just seem to copy it over blindly from IBM arches.
For example ... Linuxppc64 even follow the broken AIX alignment that long long ints are aligned to 8 but doubles are only aligned to 4 in structures. This creates lots of problems for OpenOffice.org since AIX and Linuxppc64 are the only platforms doing that. I contributed a patch that allows doubles to be aligned to 8 (-malign-natural) to gcc that should be part of gcc 3.4 when it is released. It was accepted.
Perhaps, we should spend some time coming up with some basic abi improvements and try to get patches into the gcc tree to conditionally enable them. I don't think IBM or Apple which uses a variant of IBM's abi are going to be helping make any changes on their own. So I think it is up to us if it is going to get done, otherwise we are doomed to live with it since it will soon be cast in stone.
My 2 cents, Kevin On Nov 16, 2003, at 12:19 AM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
It sounds like a reason to get a new ABI. There's no reason we have to blindly follow OS/400.Amen ! Ben.