Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!shelby!polya!Polya.Stanford.EDU!ham From: ham@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Peter R. Ham) Newsgroups: gnu.gcc Subject: Re: putting architectural info outside gcc ? Message-ID: Date: 10 Sep 89 18:58:11 GMT References: Sender: USENET News System Distribution: gnu Organization: Stanford University Lines: 18 In-reply-to: eho@clarity.Princeton.EDU's message of 10 Sep 89 07:08:51 GMT Persoally, I like the generality of your approach. Unfortunately, compilations would probably run much slower using such an architectual database. Speed, is one of the primary advantages of using macros that way gcc does. Turning all of those machine dependent macros into items in a database seems like a huge chore to me. I wouldn't recommend this trying to implement this change to anyone, although I agree the results would be "clean", but probably much slower. If you are going to rewrite gcc from scatch and are not concerned about compilation speed, the go for it. The use of macros is a major design decision in gcc. (At least it looks like it from reading the code). Maybe further discussiong of gcc's design should go ong gnu.gcc.bug. -- Peter Ham PO Box 3430 (h)(415) 324-9645 MS Computer Science Student Stanford, CA ham@polya.stanford.edu Stanford University 94309 (o)(415) 723-2067