Re: Benefits of latest gas?

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 01:06:49PM -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
> As some of you may know, Mac OS X has long been using gas 1.38, pre-BFD
> and all, as its system assembler, heavily hacked to do Mach-O and
> support all of Apple's various extensions. Recently I had occasion
> to look at the some of the barbaric expression code in our version,
> and thinking "surely the latest code is much improved", went and looked
> at the latest version, and it didn't really seem changed by that much,
> which was disappointing. In fact, quite a bit of 1.38 seems the same as
> current gas sources.
> 
> Up to now I've been generally assuming that staying on the old gas was
> a poor strategy, and that the massive effort that would be needed to get
> Mach-O into latest gas would be an investment quickly repaid in better
> quality, better error-checking, etc. But now I'm not so sure. We really
> only have the one target (PPC), plus x86 for Darwin, so portability
> arguments aren't that compelling, and the assembler is pretty much in
> the noise compile-time-wise already.
> 
> So what are the features of latest gas vs 1.38 that would make my
> management whip out the checkbook for a merge/upgrade project?

Well, here's one for you - I know Apple is talking about a migration to
DWARF2 at the same time, and recent versions of gas support notating
assembly code with DWARF2 unwind information.  Now that the feature is
available I'm seeing uses of it pop up all over the place.

I'm sure there are plenty of others, but I couldn't guess what they are
- I don't think I'd even heard of binutils around 1.38 :)

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer