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Re: GAS .fpu directive


On 27 August 2014 17:41, Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha@arm.com> wrote:
> It depends on whether "incorrect" here means "if you don't know what
> you're doing you can foul things up; but if you're careful, this is very
> powerful", or whether it means, "this is fundamentally broken".

The difference between "powerful" and "broken" is if you hit the edge
cases or not. The C++ standard has some clear rules about undefined,
unspecified or implementation defined behaviour, and I believe this
case is of a similar trait. All I'm asking is to acknowledge that this
is undefined and that users should be made aware of the problems, at
least via a warning. In my view, a tool is fundamentally broken if it
allows broken edge cases to pass all checks, and that's exactly what
both assemblers are doing in this case.

The one fundamentally broken issue is the context. It seems that Power
has the ability to push/pop features, which fixes it. We don't. I'm
trying to mitigate the issues by warning the user on dangerous
behaviour, and later on to restrict usage (or at least the context) to
a more sane semantics.

Whether the latter is done or not should not stop the former from
being done. I can't see how a warning on multiple directives would
hurt anything, to be honest.


> What I don't want to see is someone tinkering with what is clearly a
> fragile API and causing problems for existing toolchains without having
> worked through the issues.

That's why I sent the email to the list, to collect ideas and more
edge cases. I've done the homework before contacting the list, but I
can't possibly do that to all architectures on my own, and I'm not
experienced enough to do that comprehensively even for ARM, without
resorting to people like you to validate my findings.

I really appreciate your support and I understand that this is not
high priority.

cheers,
--renato


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