Ocamlopt x86-32 and SSE2

["CUOQ Pascal" <Pascal.CUOQ@cea.fr>]

Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr> wrote:
>2- Declare pre-SSE2 processors obsolete and convert the current
>   "i386" port to always use SSE2 float arithmetic.
>
>3- Support both x87 and SSE2 float arithmetic within the same i386
>   port, with a command-line option to activate SSE2, like gcc does.

As someone with somewhat of an obsession for keeping
obsolete computers in function as long as they are not broken,
I have to interject something.

I still have a functional Pentium 90 (granted, that's not
the newest computer that does not support SSE2, but
please hear me). I gave up the idea of bootstrapping
OCaml on it years ago because it has 16Mb of memory,
and that became insufficient around the time Camlp4 became
part of the distribution. I would have had either to modify
the compilation flow or cross-compile, both of which were
too much work for the meagre resulting cool factor.
Now, both the old and the new Camlp4 are
fine pieces of software that make use of
resources available nowadays to make things possible
that weren't before. I am not complaining. I am saying that
you have to be consistent in your requirements.

My father was using Debian on a 500MHz K6-3D that I had
somehow been able to upgrade with enough memory
to run one of the two popular desktops. He finally
upgraded to a new computer because he could
see the characters being displayed one by one in the
e-mail client. That, or the motherboard died. I can't
remember. It was serendipitous, anyway.

There are plenty of embedded processors with an x86
instruction set and no SSE2 around, but these are not in
the cool toys that we want to run OCaml on. The cool
toys have ARM processors.

My message is: I am one of the people who have the peculiar
mental illness that leads one to suggest a compatible option.

Well, I am not.

Take option 2 and run with it!

>However, packagers are
>going to be very unhappy: Debian still lists i486 as its bottom line;
>for Fedora, it's Pentium or Pentium II; for Windows, it's "a 1GHz
>processor", meaning Pentium III.  All these processors lack SSE2
>support.  Only MacOS X is SSE2-compatible from scratch.

Only Linux distributions are a problem, if OCaml packages
are at risk of being rejected.

Just because Windows still works on old computers doesn't force
every program to do the same (flame bait: and I would add that
Windows' support for old computers is mostly unintentional).

In Linux distributions, is it completely forbidden to have packages
that will not work on the bottom line?
This is (I assume) Ocaml 3.12 that we are talking about, which
would land sometime in 2010 and arrive in binary distributions
that are scheduled to be released in 2011. Will Debian maintain
its delusion of supporting the i486 by that time?

Pascal