On Sun, 2010-05-23 at 23:15 +0200, Steven Bosscher wrote: > On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Mark Mitchell <m...@codesourcery.com> wrote: > > Martin Guy wrote: > > > >> Dropping FPA support from GCC effectively makes the OABI unusable, and > >> often we are forced to use that by the environment supplied to us. Are > >> there significant advantages to removing FPA support, other than > >> reducing the size of the ARM backend? > > > > I think that maintainability of the ARM backend is indeed the major > > benefit to dropping it. > > There are lots of other ports that could be dropped to improve > maintainability of some backends, or even the whole of GCC. That has > never been accepted as a good reason to drop anything if there are > still users of it, no matter how few (see pdp11 / vax backends, > osf/tru64 support, other random unmaintained backends, ...). > > What is different about arm-elf? >
What's different is that there is a well-maintained arm-eabi port. The arm-elf port and all its legacy just gets in the way. The vax back-end only affects VAX; likewise for the PDP11 port. I think it's critical that we don't let the tail wag the dog here. R.
