On 21/02/2010 19:09, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 7:25 PM, Martin Guy <martinw...@gmail> wrote:
>> As an example of the results of that kind of thinking, we've had years
>> of pain and wasted time in the ARM world due to the default
>> architecture being armv5t instead of armv4t. The results are that user
>> after user, making their first steps compiling a cross toolchain,
>> turns up on the mailing lists having got "illegal instruction" after
>> days of work, and that almost all the distributions are forced to
>> carry an "unbreak armv4t" patch to GCC.
> But anyway, bringing ARM into this discussion is neither here nor there.
Except inasmuch as that the proposed fix for i?86 could be extended with
similar behaviour for arm and then people could set the default by using the
right cpu name in the --target setting and it would solve this problem too.
>> The time-honoured policy of having the default settings work on as
>> wide a range hardware as possible is a socially inclusive one.
>> Some manifestos chisel the "low bar" into their constitutions (Debian
>> for example); it would be nice for GCC to do so too.
>
> You're off it with the "socially inclusive" argument. No-one is
> excluded at all, if the defaults are changed. The only thing that
> happens is that the small number of users with exceptional
> configurations get the burden of dealing with the -march/-mtune
> options.
I too am having a hard time envisaging exactly who would be in this class of
users who are simultaneously so naive that they don't know about -march or
-mcpu or think to read the manual, and yet so advanced that they are trying to
write programs for and rebuild modern compilers on ancient equipment....
cheers,
DaveK
