Alexandre Oliva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > See why imprecise abstractions are a problem, and why lowering > abstractions just because it's possible ATM, without any performance > or maintainability gains to justify them, is a losing proposition in > the long run?
To be blunt: no, I don't. I see a set of hypothetical possibilities, none of which I consider to be at all likely. Any decision can be argued endlessly. That's why this is a bikeshed. Two patches have been proposed. For a bikeshed, real code wins over abstract discussion. More specifically, backend routines are never called arbitrarily or randomly. The backends already know that only the insns which have to check no_new_pseudos are the move expanders and the splitters. For example, look for calls to gen_reg_rtx in i386.md. Most of them do not check no_new_pseudos, and they don't have to. If you want your more general semantics, don't you logically have to change that too? After all, just as the register allocator might somehow support creating new pseudo registers in the middle of it, the register allocator might similarly support changing the operations which were done. But since these aspects of the register allocator are not at all likely to change, wouldn't it be a waste of time to prepare for them now? I have never liked no_new_pseudos, because it is a negative flag and therefore confusing to use. It is also currently carries no meaning. The former meaning was not as crisp as you would like it to be: it was there to remind people to call the appropriate functions to resize the register arrays. Only it didn't express that very well, so for complete correctness you had to actually check both (no_new_pseudos && (reload_in_progress || reload_completed)). Only nobody bothered to do that, because passes generally knew whether they were run before or after register allocation. Note that because of this the backend routines treated the variable differently from the frontend routines. For these reasons, since the underlying meaning of no_new_pseudos is no longer necessary, I am seizing the opportunity to eliminate it. Ian
