I should point out, I speak for my self in all of this not for my employer or previous
ones.
On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:17 PM, Tim Sneddon <tim at sneddon.id.au> wrote:
It did do IA-32, IA-64, Alpha, MIPS.
And INTEL*64 to an extent (although it was not released). As I understand it, the
project was show it could be done and it was fodder/part of the GEM vs Intel C war that
GEM lost. But as I understand it from my compiler friends, it was fairy easy to take
the x32 tables and make them 64 bits and add new instructions. The advantage was the IL
was easier to do some of the cool things INTEL*64 needs but alas it was in BLISS and Intel
was not going to base it's compiler's on BLISS (which I can understand from a
business standpoint].
As Grove once told me, GEM was designed to be a compiler to last 25 years. They knew it
would have to support a number of features we now re having a heck of time dealing with in
today's code generators and ILs. No other suite so far has done as wide job and
able to handle the diversity of languages and architectures.
GCC has been made to work, and was the first FOSS compiler to come close. But the
difference between GCC's code generator for INTEL*64 compared to icc is not even close
for real applications programs.
It will be interesting to see if LLVM is able to do as well as GEM did. You have a lot
of the thought leaders in compiler land betting on it. Apple's moved to it. Intel
will do something with it for the Exascale machines because DOE wants it, as will IBM or
any other firm that wants to "prime" a Supercomputer in the future I would bet
(but do not know).