Quoting Jeff Law <l...@redhat.com>:
That adds quite a bit of complication to the compiler though -- getting the instruction lengths right (and thus proper packing & alignment) can be extremely difficult. I did some experiments with this on a target with *fixed* instruction lengths a while back and even though the port tried hard to get lengths right, it would routinely miss something. Ultimately I decided that it forcing the compiler to know instruction lengths with a very high degree of accuracy wasn't a sane thing to do. Dealing with variable instruction lengths just adds yet another complexity to the situation. Then add the complication of needing to add specific prefixes or nops and it just gets downright ugly.
I did add alignment-aware & exact branch shortening to the ARCompact port, but ultimately the added complexity due to this was also a factor why the port couldn't go into mainline without an active maintainer. The code is available on branches. See PR target/39303.
