> This is a well known problem and the reason that arm32 hasn't switched
> to egcs yet. IIRC softloat.c uses some bugs in gcc that egcs doesn't

It was only a bug if you required compatibility with the reference Acorn
compiler. EGCS is choosing to be compatible, even though it means a small
performance hit when returning 8-byte structs.

I just checked gdb-4.17 and the BFD in there doesn't know about the Acorn
compiler's object format, just RISCiX and the usual American suspects:
aout, coff, and (ugh) PECOFF.

So it's not particularly easy for us to actually _link_ with code produced
by the Acorn compiler. That means nobody is really in danger of experiencing
real problems, and transitioning our own ABI is a royal pain, so why do it?

About the only argument I can think of is that we may want easy integration
with cross compilers that use the Acorn object format, but that would depend
on upcoming work in egcs (of which I might simply be unaware).

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com