Re: Q: access to subprogram

[Ronald Cole <ronald@ridgecrest.ca.us>]

dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> not all compilers are like this, GCC has only one back end, but many
> compilers do have myultiple backends).

Not true.  A single instance of GCC doesn't support multiple machine
targets (other than the -m options for some processor families).  GCC
has to be recompiled to support different machine descriptions (that's
what the -b and -V options of gcc are for).  I consider this as having
multiple backends.  Many years ago, when asked about why he didn't
make GCC read loadable md files, Stallman answered that it would hurt
performance (both for the compiler and for the generated code) (there
were probably a few other reasons, but it was too long ago for me to
remember them all.  that was around the time when Stallman said that
writing what we now know as the bfd libraries would be "hard").

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