Re: Ada and Automotive Industry

[kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

In article <b127cc$f381c.17e@marius> ken@nrtt.demon.co.uk writes:
>I have seen what's been done for the 68HC11 with gcc:

There is no GCC port to the 68HC11 and none has ever been submitted
for consideration in the years I've been in charge of GCC maintenance.

What you must be talking about is somebody's preliminary attempt to
port GCC to that processor.  Clearly they didn't even think enough of
it to submit it for consideration in the GCC release.

So it is not reasonable to use it as a judge for what a proper port
might look at.

>gcc assumes a register rich architecture.

GCC makes no such assumption.  It knows precisely how many registers are
available and what each can do.  It does tend to do better on machines
that have a lot of registers, but that's true for most compilers.

>The code quality is consequently poor.

The code quality is poor most likely because the person who did the
port did it badly.  It is somewhat tricky to do a port to a machine
with a small number of registers because some of the config file
macros that select which hueristics to use are relatively unimportant
on machines with lots of registers, but are much more important on
machines with only a few.