Arbitrary Size Integer Arrays

[bearophile]

dsimcha:

>1.  Packing them is the whole point.<

It's your whole point, but LLVM is designed for many purposes, and such numbers are useful when you design hardware circuits starting from a C-like description.


> and if
> it were a compiler intrinsic that was specific to a backend, it wouldn't be
> portable so noone would use it.

Uhm... let's see.

D currently doesn't have computed gotos because Walter said they are lot of work to implement and because they are mostly useful when you want to implement an interpreter. Yet I have found an usage of such computed gotos to speed up "parsing" of biological information.

D can be compiled on GCC and LLVM backends too, and they both already support computed gotos. I don't know if Intel and Microsoft C++ compilers support computed gotos.

Standard C doesn't allow for computed gotos, but GCC has them as not standard extension, and I guess some people use them.

Limiting what D can do, refusing to use a nice feature of GCC/LLVM, because DMC doesn't currently have such feature doesn't look nice to me.

So I may like to see this feature added to D specs (and implemented LDC/GDC) even if DMC can't support it.

Bye,
bearophile