December 2009 Archives
Tue Dec 8 15:15:24 EST 2009
Compiler activity slowing down
As most of you who have been tracking this have realized by now, not much is happening with GCC6809 at the moment. It's serving its original purpose for me quite well, and I don't have a strong desire to make many more changes to it going forward.
The core GCC 4.3.4 is a very stable compiler release; few relevant updates have occurred that warrant another GCC6809 release. GCC 4.4 continues to give me problems and I've basically abandoned it. I've spent enough time already debugging numerous code generator bugs, and there's no compelling reason for me to upgrade to GCC 4.4 anyway.
There are a few optimizations I've made since August which haven't been officially released yet; they are extremely minor. I will eventually roll them out, but existing users probably don't want to bother upgrading.
There is one experimental side project I've devoted some time to -- that of improving the support for 32-bit math. Current GCC6809 generates mostly correct but hideously inefficient code for this. I have an idea on how to fix it, but I can't make any promises. I will post an update as soon as I have more information.