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From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada in Debian: gnat-4.4 is in unstable; please test
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:43:37 -0700 (PDT)
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Date: 2009-08-10T13:43:37-07:00
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I wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> - enable support for multiarch (i.e. for i386/amd64 and others: emit
> 64-bit binaries on 32-bit platforms and vice-versa; for mips/mipsel,
> emit little-endian code on big-endian platforms and vice-versa). =A0This
> is a new feature in GCC 4.4.

Before anyone who doesn't know GCC very well asks: GCC has had support
for multiarch for several years now but the Ada front-end was lagging
behind; GCC 4.4 adds support for multiarch in the Ada front-end.

Also, multiarch is difficult.  There are deep issues with holistic
system architectures and decisions to be made; 32/64-bit support is
hairy enough as it is but consider it only one particular case of
multi-arch support.  I mentioned little-endian/big-endian already and
we can have multiple combinations.  For example, I gather modern
PowerPC processors can run all four combinations of 32-bit/LE, 32-bit/
BE, 64-bit/LE and 64-bit/BE *concurrently*, not to mention emulated
architectures, the Synergistic Processing Units of the Cell processor
and GPUs used for number crunching.  We live interesting times :)

--
Ludovic Brenta.