Re: [Qemu-devel] Proposal for amending TCG interface naming scheme

[Peter Maydell]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2019 at 13:50, Aleksandar Markovic
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hello, all.
>
> I noticed certain barrier and difficulties wrt learning TCG interface by 
> newcomers and to some extent oldcomers too. At least some of them can be 
> attributed to not best choice of names for functions TCG exposes, especially 
> in the area of extract and sextract. I have a quick idea on how to improve it 
> using the following renaming scheme:
>
> tcg_gen_extract_i32
> tcg_gen_extract_i64
> tcg_gen_extract_tl
> tcg_gen_sextract_i32
> tcg_gen_sextract_i64
> tcg_gen_sextract_tl
> tcg_gen_extract2_i32
> tcg_gen_extract2_i64
> tcg_gen_extract2_tl
> tcg_gen_extrl_i64_i32
> tcg_gen_extrh_i64_i32
> tcg_gen_ext_i32_i64
> tcg_gen_extu_i32_i64
>
> could become:
>
> tcg_gen_select_i32
> tcg_gen_select_i64
> tcg_gen_select_tl
> tcg_gen_select_s_i32
> tcg_gen_select_s_i64
> tcg_gen_select_s_tl
> tcg_gen_gather_i32
> tcg_gen_gather_i64
> tcg_gen_gather_tl
> tcg_gen_extract_l_i64_i32
> tcg_gen_extract_h_i64_i32
> tcg_gen_extend_s_i32_i64
> tcg_gen_extend_0_i32_i64
>
> The idea is to provide significant "lexicographic" distance between those 
> groups of functions, rather than having the similar name (wiht common root 
> "ext) for all of them.

The current naming of the extract/sextract TCG ops is intended to keep
them in line with the extract32/sextract32/extract64/sextract64 utility
functions in bitops.h. I think those ones are reasonably named. The
other ops are a bit more ad-hoc in naming, admittedly...

thanks
-- PMM