On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 02:24:49PM +0200, Martin Schlemmer wrote: > On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 02:08 +0200, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote: > > On Friday 07 July 2006 01:54, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > > > | No, we never spent years telling them not to use your so-called > > > | "CFLAGS hacks" that are rather a proper usage of what the compiler > > > | gives you. > > > Wrong. We did. > > Then you were wrong. I could have spent time explaining them when they make > > sense and why they don't in their usecases. If you did, well, then you > > really > > need to know better what you do because you seem to me pretty confused > > yourself, and I feel pity for you. > > > > Yes, we did. Were we wrong? Out of a purest point of view ... maybe. > The problem was though that earlier gcc's was very bad at generating > sse/sse2, and sometimes mmx code. > > Users being what they are though (ricers should say it all), they > enabled every flag that sounded like it could make their old box two > times faster. This included -msse, -msse2, etc. Which quite frankly > produced bad code in many cases. So we told the users to not add any > -m* flags, and let gcc do its job with the proper -march. > > So yeah, I can see that general use flags for cpu features might become > more tedious with the many new modules of processors out there, but to > say handle it by adding -msse, etc to CFLAGS, will surely if not on > gcc4, but then on gcc3 systems just ask for trouble. > > And yes, I know you are saying that that is not exactly what you are > proposing, but the users will see it as a clear passport to stick all > those nice sounding flags just right back in, and then it will be too > late to tell them its not proper thing to do when the bugs start > flooding in.
Dumb question, but what really blocks them from doing that now for x86 (for example)? Yes, can't enable certain flags for non x86/x86_64 arches, but the con you're pointing at exists now for the most part. ~harring
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