Benefits of latest gas?

[Stan Shebs]

Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:

>On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 01:06:49PM -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>>As some of you may know, Mac OS X has long been using gas 1.38, pre-BFD
>>and all, as its system assembler, heavily hacked to do Mach-O and
>>support all of Apple's various extensions. Recently I had occasion
>>to look at the some of the barbaric expression code in our version,
>>and thinking "surely the latest code is much improved", went and looked
>>at the latest version, and it didn't really seem changed by that much,
>>which was disappointing. In fact, quite a bit of 1.38 seems the same as
>>current gas sources.
>>
>>Up to now I've been generally assuming that staying on the old gas was
>>a poor strategy, and that the massive effort that would be needed to get
>>Mach-O into latest gas would be an investment quickly repaid in better
>>quality, better error-checking, etc. But now I'm not so sure. We really
>>only have the one target (PPC), plus x86 for Darwin, so portability
>>arguments aren't that compelling, and the assembler is pretty much in
>>the noise compile-time-wise already.
>>
>>So what are the features of latest gas vs 1.38 that would make my
>>management whip out the checkbook for a merge/upgrade project?
>>
>
>Well, here's one for you - I know Apple is talking about a migration to
>DWARF2 at the same time, and recent versions of gas support notating
>assembly code with DWARF2 unwind information.  Now that the feature is
>available I'm seeing uses of it pop up all over the place.
>
Yeah, I'd like to understand that more. I already got dwarf2 (mostly)
working in Apple's tools, and didn't do any assembler hacks, so must
be missing something. :-)

Stan