GCC 12.1 Released

Posted May 8, 2022 21:14 UTC (Sun) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
In reply to: GCC 12.1 Released by NYKevin
Parent article: GCC 12.1 Released

It's even worse (or better), ARM is also excellent with unaligned accesses nowadays, so you if you don't run your code on a wide variety of platforms, you can have broken code that runs fine on the two most popular platforms without ever noticing.

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GCC 12.1 Released

Posted May 8, 2022 22:47 UTC (Sun) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (2 responses)

It’s also not unrealistic to write code only aimed at those platforms…. I’m involved in a decent size project and we target those two plus a variant of PowerPC and that last is for weird semi-historical reasons.

For a specific software project, it’s not crazy to only aim at ARM and x86, or even just x86 or ARM depending on what you’re up to.

How many non-embedded systems aren’t one of those two? Is it even 0.1% any more? I’m sure it’s not 1%.

GCC 12.1 Released

Posted May 8, 2022 23:38 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

This is a valid position for application code to take, but library code IMHO generally should not be in the business of dictating architecture support unless it is doing something hardware-specific (e.g. if your library provides fast lock-free data structures, it's fair enough to say "the hardware must support certain atomic primitives," if your library does float math, it's fair enough to say "the hardware must conform to IEEE 754," and so on). Thing is, there's a lot of library code out there[citation needed], and it's hard to say with absolute certainty which libraries are getting used on more esoteric hardware configurations.

GCC 12.1 Released

Posted May 15, 2022 16:53 UTC (Sun) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

That's typically what I'm doing with asm or arch-specific optimizations in general: try to make sure the code works on generic platforms (since it helps detect bugs) and only make efforts on relevant ones, typically x86 and armv8 in my case.