Would it be possible to use the named address space syntax to implement
reverse-endian data? Conversion between little-endian and big-endian
data structures is something that turns up regularly in embedded
systems, where you might well be using two different architectures with
different endianness. Some compilers offer direct support for endian
swapping, but gcc has no neat solution. You can use the
__builtin_bswap32 (but no __builtin_bswap16?) function in recent
versions of gcc, but you still need to handle the swapping explicitly.
Named address spaces would give a very neat syntax for using such
byte-swapped areas. Ideally you'd be able to write something like:
__swapendian stuct { int a; short b; } data;
and every access to data.a and data.b would be endian-swapped. You
could also have __bigendian and __litteendian defined to __swapendian or
blank depending on the native ordering of the target.
I've started reading a little about how named address spaces work, but I
don't know enough to see whether this is feasible or not.
Another addition in a similar vein would be __nonaligned, for targets
which cannot directly access non-aligned data. The loads and stores
would be done byte-wise for slower but correct functionality.
