On Jul 21, 2000, Greg McGary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Alexandre Oliva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> This sounds reasonably reasonable :-), but I wonder if people
>> wouldn't complain about the additional seldom-used code in the
>> configure script.
> Do people complain about such things?
I've heard people not liking the idea of unrolling some shell loops in
AC_CHECK_*S. This can really increase the size of a configure script.
>> My fear is that, as soon as we start to accommodate not-so-common
>> features in standard autoconf, we may lose our argument against
>> supporting really weird stuff that shows up every now and then.
> It all boils down to whether you consider bounds checking to be a
> "really weird" feature.
It's definitely not, and I had intended to make this clear in my
reply. But proponents of weird features may point at
bounded-pointers, which *they* might consider weird, and use it to
convince us to accept their weird feature. Of course, we may be able
to decline their proposals with other arguments, but they may feel
we're not being fair.
> I hope it will become a first-class feature which deserves full
> toolchain support.
I'm glad to hear that. It's a very important feature, IMO.
> The problem is that gcc doesn't know that the function being tested
> has pointers, so it must assume that all functions potentially have
> pointers and generate a thunk.
I'm talking about generating the thunk at the time you compile the BP
function, not when you compile its user. So you'd be able to use BP
functions even though your compiler doesn't support BPs, or you're not
using the switch that enables them.
--
Alexandre Oliva Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me
