Re: Small change in NSObject.m ASM needed for PowerPC build

[Fred Kiefer]

David Chisnall wrote:
> On 4 May 2009, at 21:07, Fred Kiefer wrote:
> 
>> And what if we are actually
>> on a i386? And what should we do when we are on a machine where gcc does
>> not provide that new build in? Currently NSIncrementExtraRefCount works
>> slowly on such machines, but it works.
> 
> Actually, it doesn't.  If we are on i386, the original inline asm is
> used.  This uses instructions which are not present on 386 chips, and so
> will fail at runtime.  This change just means that it now fails at link
> time instead, which is probably an improvement, although a small one.

OK, so I have to rephrase my words, it used to work but with current
code it may already fail on some machines.

Please keep in mind that my i586 is surely able to execute these
instructions, still I get a link error with your latest patch. I think
we agree that the aim is to get it to work out of the box on as much
environments as possible. The i486 assembler code already restricted
that a bit, but nobody has complained up to now (and the change has been
in a full year already). The gcc build in change would break it on my
machine and an unknown amount of others as well.

Fred