18 Aug
2013
18 Aug
'13
6:56 a.m.
On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 04:19:27PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
[...]
It's also ugly, full of warts mostly driven off
compatability with properties
of the past (I almost wrote "mistakes of the past", but I'm not convinced
they _were_ mistakes when they were made; the mistake in those cases lies in
keeping it around past its time).
So just put the damn thing into long mode and the legacy compatibility warts go
away. Segmentation, gone. The broken BCD stuff, *poof*. x87, uh, still there
but at least we can ignore it and use SSE and friends instead which are
guaranteed to exist.
There are some odd corners such as %r8-%15 not supporting direct access to the
byte at bits 15-8 of a register like you can with e.g. %ah, but that's no
weirder a limitation than being unable to do byte operations on %a0-%a7 on the
68000.