On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 10:04 PM, David Edelsohn <dje....@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Steven Bosscher <stevenb....@gmail.com> wrote: > >> What I don't understand, is whether this is still something GNAT has >> to support, or whether this code can be deprecated/removed. And I ask >> for your help because you are one of the people who worked on this >> so-many-years ago >> (http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-12/msg00550.html) and because >> you obviously have much better understanding of GNAT and of how this >> kind of low-level thing works in GCC than I do. >> >> If this should continue to be supported: >> For the corresponding option for G++ (-fconserve-space) the >> documentation says that the flag isn't very useful anymore because: >> "This option is no longer useful on most targets, now that support has >> been added for putting variables into BSS without making them common." >> What I don't understand, is what this means for GNAT. (Remember, I >> help build aircraft for a living, not compilers! I can barely >> distinguish .bss from .data, and don't understand at all where/how GCC >> decides to put variables in one section or another :-D) I was hoping >> maybe you know how to rewrite that piece of code such that you get >> that uninitialized variable into BSS without DECL_COMMON. >> >> Or maybe you can tell if this code is no longer needed, so I can >> prepare a patch to remove it. > > Is this feature necessary for non-ELF file formats, such as AIX XCOFF?
Maybe. But none of the other front ends seem to need this to put uninitialized variables in a.bss-like section. Ciao! Steven
