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by nbsd4life 2769 days ago
Is it weird to support some of these today? we just dropped acorn26, although it was gone for a few years.

I think mips r3k has a better behaving add ("addu"), or is that only on some? if your compiler outputs these you don't have to worry about special behavior.

I'd say a bigger concern, for vax - the lack of IEEE754 is noticeable when people pick unsuitable float constants, or it traps by default. or the many GCC bugs now.

For mips r3k, the complete lack of atomics. And the load delays.

2 comments

r3k didn't really need atomics. It wasn't SMP, and being a braindead simple 5-stage RISC, a syscall to atomic primitives was in the neighborhood of as cheap as atomic instructions are today. Cheaper if you were already in a KSEG.

And load delays are annoying when writing asm manually, but not for the C compiler.

And yeah, addu was in MIPS-I.

> lack of IEEE754

Course for 98% of use cases IEEE754 is broken.