[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] Drop support for gcc-2.95

[Guillaume Poirier]

Hi,

Rich Felker wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 10:05:29AM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:


>>* intrinsics, well gcc until 4.? generated terribly bad code for intrinsics
> 
> 
> should not be used; if you're writing asm write asm dammit.. don't try
> to extend the C language to include asm.

Yep, if you're writing asm, you're writing asm. This is a beautiful
truism right there Rich!

But intrinsics aren't asm, they are meant allow the programmer to
explicit the bare minimum to exploit extra instructions, and leave the
boring stuff to the compiler (register allocation, scheduling, etc...)
This has the big advantage that it makes the code simpler to read
(because you can use variable names) and more portable (think about
the x86 and x86-64 case).

Now, whether or not the compiler does a good job are generating good
ASM out of intrinsics is another story.
Please keep in mind though that all Altivec code is written with
intrinsics, and apart from some corner cases, ppl seem to be happy
with that situation.



Regards,

Guillaume