Could we agree to disagree and come together on improvements andclean-up?

[Joerg Arndt]

* NightStrike <nightstrike at gmail.com> [Jun 02. 2008 02:49]:
> On 6/1/08, Joerg Arndt <arndt at jjj.de> wrote:
> > Avoiding stupid things like casting pointers to integers
> > (or better, avoiding pointer casts to anything but other pointers
> > as defined by the standard) is a must.
> 
> This I agree with 100%.  But would patches to remove that stupid
> behavior be accepted?

If there are such issues (I do not know!) have you tried submitting
a patch?


> 
> > Roughly, the code should work on what I call a sane arch/model:
> > - long is machine word,
> 
> If this is what you want, then you are specifically saying "I don't
> want GMP on Windows -- end of story"

No!
Firstly I personally do not care and will not invest any work in that.
Secondly, I assume (and may be wrong) that having the full performance
of the 64-bit arch with long=32-bit may need many changes.

If GMP is mainly needed for gcc then what is the problem with
suboptimal performance?  I doubt gcc will need much more than 128-bit
precision!  (At least not a thousand or so).  The time needed inside
GMP routines should be negligible (again, I could be wrong, but I'd be
utterly surprised if the performance of GMP would be critical here)!


> 
> > - byte order is little- or big- endian (not 1342 or such),
> > - two's complement,
> > - no exception on integer overflow,
> > - bits per int/long is a power of two
> > - [add your sanity requirements].
> >
> > Not-so-sane archs/models _will_ require much extra work but
> > I do not see any point in anticipating some vendor will do
> > the silly thing to ship such an environment.
> >
> > Should there be the need to have a compiles-everywhere version
> > of GMP for gcc I'd expect the gcc people to help out.
> 
> GCC people can't do anything if GMP won't accept the patches.

I haven't heard about any complaints from the gcc folks so far.


> 
> Further, specifically writing code that will purposefully not work on
> a mainstream platform like Windows is the type of attitude that
> warrants a fork.

I am not aware of any such attempt.  Please give a pointer!

Calling Windows a mainstream platform is IMHO not helpful for this
particular discussion.

And we have a fork now, not that I am happy about that.