RE: [PATCH 0/4] -ffreestanding/-fno-builtin-* patches

[David Laight <David.Laight@ACULAB.COM>]

From: Nick Desaulniers
> Sent: 18 August 2020 21:59
> 
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 1:27 PM Nick Desaulniers
> <ndesaulniers@google.com> wrote:
...
> > > -ffreestanding as it stands today does have __builtin_memcpy and
> > > friends. But you need to then use #define memcpy __builtin_memcpy etc,
> > > which is messy and also doesn't fully express what you want. #pragma, or
> > > even just allowing -fbuiltin-foo options would be useful.
> 
> I do really like the idea of -fbuiltin-foo.  For example, you'd specify:
> 
> -ffreestanding -fbuiltin-bcmp
> 
> as an example. `-ffreestanding` would opt you out of ALL libcall
> optimizations, `-fbuiltin-bcmp` would then opt you back in to
> transforms that produce bcmp.  That way you're informing the compiler
> more precisely about the environment you'd be targeting.  It feels
> symmetric to existing `-fno-` flags (clang makes -f vs -fno- pretty
> easy when there is such symmetry).  And it's already convention that
> if you specify multiple conflicting compiler flags, then the latter
> one specified "wins."  In that sense, turning back on specific
> libcalls after disabling the rest looks more ergonomic to me.
> 
> Maybe Eli or David have thoughts on why that may or may not be as
> ergonomic or possible to implement as I imagine?

You might want -fbuiltin-bcmp=my_bcmp_function so that you can specify
the actual elf symbol name to be used.

I was recently trying to compile an application so that it would
run on a system with an old libc.
Avoiding explicit calls to new functions wasn't a problem, but I
couldn't do anything about the memcpy() calls generated by gcc
for structure copies.
Due to the silly glibc fiasco with memcpy going backwards I'd
either need to force out a reference to the old version of memcpy
or a reference to memove - but neither is possible.

I then tried a C++ program and gave up because 'char traits'
was all different. I then realised I need to remove all references
to std::string to get any kind of efficient object code :-)

	David

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