Re: Removal of hppa support

[Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com>]

Hi :)

On Sun 26 Jan 2020 07:19, William ML Leslie <william.leslie.ttg@gmail.com> writes:

> On Sun, 26 Jan 2020, 4:46 pm William ML Leslie, <william.leslie.ttg@gmail.com> wrote:
>  On Sun, 26 Jan 2020, 8:20 am John Paul Adrian Glaubitz, <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
>  > I noticed that you recently purged hppa support from guile [1].
>
>  This change does not remove hppa support from guile, only support for
>  the jit.
>
>  As an ia64 user, i'm a bit sad that we lost jit too - but i don't run
>  any performance-sensitive guile jobs on that system.
>
> Maybe /lost/ is the wrong word. We won't be benefitting from the work
> the lightning team have done in supporting hacker-friendly
> architectures in guile 3. This jit is completely new.

William is correct.  HPPA support is not gone from Guile; and indeed
it's good to hear from you :)  I wasn't sure there were any IA64 users
remaining.

Initially in Guile I planned to use GNU Lightning, in part because of
its great platform support.  However it turned out to not be the right
thing, and reluctantly I ended up doing something that was more like a
rewrite than a refactor.  In that context I personally don't have the
budget to write the IA64 backend.  So, Guile 3 still runs on IA64, just
without JIT support.

If someone would like to write an IA64 backend for Lightening, I would
be happy to accept it :)  The beginnings of one are there in the git
history.

Andy