[M3devel] 64bit big-endian

[microcode at zoho.com]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 09:05:39PM +0000, Jay K wrote:
> SPARC32_SOLARIS is a new name for SOLsun/SOLgnu.

But which? Sun cc or gcc? And then it would seem from your comment there is
at least one duplicate download. This is confusing.

> Not sure if it should be PPC or PPC32, SPARC or SPARC32,
>  I386 or X86 or IA32 or what, but ok.

With i386, x86, and IA32 everybody understands we're talking about a 32 bit
version for Intel. It's just different names for the same thing and nobody
expects a compiler other than gcc to have been used to build it. 

With Solaris SPARC there are a few different things that are important. One
is you have a choice of Solaris Studio (cc) or gcc as we said. Then there is
32 v. 64 bit. Counterintuitively 32 bit is better in most situations.
Then there is the option of V9 instruction extensions over V8 but still
running 32 bit. This is normally the best performance option on 64 bit SPARC
boxes. If you want to support V8 boxes then this is another variation, or
maybe you build nominal 32 bit V8 and 64 bit V9 versions. That's suboptimal
but then one or the other or both will work on most SPARC boxes still running.

>  The old names continue to be supported. 
> We don't really need/want to encode precise versions in the names.

Understood and I am not questioning the naming conventions except for
Solaris where there are really quite a few variations and options that have
a big effect on performance and are meaningful when somebody is trying to
pick the right one.

> See, it used to be there was a roughly one to one processor to OS mapping.
> So "HPPA" implied HPUX, NetBSD/Linux/FreeBSD implied x86.

Yeah, I know. Life was simpler in the old days ;-)

>  We have access to the opencsw machines for Solaris.

That's good news. Thanks for the info. I'm glad to see how much opencsw does
for the Solaris community. I keep finding things they help with.

> There is actually very little target-dependent anywhere in the Modula-3 system at this point.
> I removed all the rewritten Posix headers for example, replaced with a more portable layer.
> (i.e. no need to know exact layout and sizes of things).

Good news! I guess that means you are using libc instead of syscalls because
I know Solaris syscalls are different from linux, etc. I don't know how
closely Solaris libc is aligned to Linux or BSD libc...

Thanks,

Israel