------- Additional Comments From pcarlini at suse dot de 2005-01-24 09:45 ------- > I have read the discussion on 17744 and 19163. Nothing there suggests > that there is any reason to prefer using an __attribute__ over using > the portable, stable, apparently already-working union approach, where > it serves. The union approach, contrariwise, is manifestly better > anywhere the __attribute__ feature is broken, which it is said still > to be, proposed patches notwithstanding.
The feature its broken and the proposed patches don't fix it. Plenty of discussions on gcc-patches and elsewhere, no doubts about this. Also, there is an agreement about the maintainers that from now one, really we should concentrate our efforts in preparing a new implementation of basic_string: these alignment problems are not new, always been there. > Why should library fixes (specifically, 19495) wait unnecessarily on > fixes for compiler extensions -- more particularly, extensions unlikely > to be fixed in the older releases whose libraries we still maintain? > What am I missing? I'm still trying to figure out a simple, non-invasive, clean, way to implement your suggestions. We don't want loads of casts, or unions, additional instantiations (requiring loads of additional includes) and failing tests elsewhere (ext/array_allocator needs tweaks), uglyness, in a word. I'm still trying to figure whether we can achieve that within the current implementation and without subtracting too much energy to other projects (among which the new implementation itself): please be patient, thanks. -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=8670
