On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 1:06 PM, Geert Bosch <bo...@adacore.com> wrote: > > On Feb 21, 2010, at 06:18, Steven Bosscher wrote: >> My point: gcc may fail to attract users (and/or may be losing users) >> when it tries to tailor to the needs of minorities. >> >> IMHO it would be much more reasonable to change the defaults to >> generate code that can run on, say, 95% of the computers still in use. >> If a user want to use the latest-and-greatest gcc for a really old >> machine, the burden of adding extra flags to change the default >> behavior of the compiler should be on that user. >> >> In this case of the i386 back end, that probably means changing the >> default to something like pentium3. > > The biggest change we need to make for x86 is to enable SSE2, > so we can get proper rounding behavior for float and double, > as well as significant performance increases.
I think Joseph fixed the rounding behavior for 4.5. Also without an adjusted ABI you'd introduce x87 <-> SSE register moves which are not helpful for performance. The present discussion is about defaulting to at least 486 when not configured for i386-linux. That sounds entirely reasonable to me. Richard. > -Geert >
