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by throwaway81523 1730 days ago
The "1980's called" issue that always gets to me is the absence of arithmetic overflow (or divide by 0) detection. You end up having to generate several additional instructions if you want to catch those errors (-trapv in gcc). On other architectures that's done with condition flags or traps.

This doesn't apply to floating point, where condition flags (confusingly called exceptions in IEEE parlance) are mandated by IEEE 857 and afaik Risc-V implements them conformantly. I don't see why they couldn't also do something like that for integers.

1 comments

I guess you use this mode when your application is IO bound.