Re: IA-64 GCC deprecation?

Regarding LRA, I saw this coming and started working on it here:
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=90785
Judging from the similar SH4 PR, I understand this isn't a trivial thing to
fix.
Is there any reason I couldn't become the ia64 maintainer, assuming there
was someone available to act as my general gcc mentor?

Jason

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 5:24 PM Jim Wilson <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 1:35 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I know that argument and I have heard it before but whenever I asked
> > for a particular example which code in question of a backend would
> > block something else, I never received an answer.
>
> It is hard to produce good examples on demand, as some of these things
> tend to be temporary problems, and someone just gets impatient enough
> that they just make a blind fix to the targets that can't be properly
> tested.
>
> A possible example here is LRA.  This is a new local register
> allocation pass that is intended to replace the very old reload pass.
> For now, some ports are continuing to use reload.  Some ports are
> using LRA.  Generally, the well maintained ports are using LRA because
> it has a number of advantages, and the poorly maintained ports are
> still using reload.  We would like to eventually obsolete the reload
> code, but we can't do that until every port switches over.  Meanwhile,
> we have to maintain two very different register allocation passes that
> do the same thing, which is twice as much work as only having one of
> them.  So we'd really like to see all ports switch over to LRA.  IA-64
> is one of the ports that hasn't switched yet.  Most of the unfixed
> ports are embedded targets, and eventually someone will get impatient
> enough to fix them even though they don't care about the target, using
> a simulator to test it.  But IA-64 is a server part, not an embedded
> part, so in theory requires more testing.  Also, there is no free
> simulator for IA-64 that I know of which makes the testing harder.
> However, there are over 20 targets that don't have LRA support yet, so
> the IA-64 port is not a blocking factor here yet.  There are people
> slowly converting random embedded ports over though, so eventually
> IA-64 will be a blocking factor if it doesn't get fixed.
>
> Jim
>
>