3 ms·

But.. there C files has changed hundreds of times, for tens of architectures, over tens of years. Who is going to want to edit 20 (or more) assembly files when

But.. there C files has changed hundreds of times, for tens of architectures, over tens of years. Who is going to want to edit 20 (or more) assembly files when a change is made? How do you add a new architecture? Do you have to keep the C files up to date and somehow check the different assembly files don't drift out of sync? Instead we could just mark some files as "These C files have to be run with GCC versions X to Y", problem solved. Then why not just compile everything with those versions of GCC?

chrisseaton 8y ago
> Instead we could just mark some files as "These C files have to be run with GCC versions X to Y", problem solved. Is it solved? You'd still have to check the generated assembly of the entire file after every change you make, to make sure it didn't have some knock-on effect that optimised something differently, even if you kept the version of the compiler the same. And is GCC deterministic? I don't know - do you? Did you know it has a flag `-frandom-seed`?