On 19-06-2012 23:22, Manu wrote:

On 19 June 2012 23:59, deadalnix <deadalnix@gmail.com

<mailto:deadalnix@gmail.com>> wrote:

   Le 19/06/2012 22:08, Iain Buclaw a écrit :

         From what I gathered from further discussion, it made sense for
       embedded platforms, such as ARM, but not x86.


   It has proven to be useful to me, not only for performances reasons,
   but also for low level manipulations.

   It don't see what make ARM that different on regard to inline
   assembly capabilities.

If you had the register alias feature I described above, would you be
ale to write such low-level manipulations using intrinsics?
I think I would be able to rewrite all x86 asm blocks I've ever written
using that feature.

ARM and PPC both have unique features relating to their branch control
and branch prediction that x86 doesn't have. Sadly, all high level
languages COMPLETELY overlook such features when designing high level
expressions, because they are traditionally designed for x86 first.

To be fair, ARM v8/AArch64 has eliminated predicated execution, simply because it turned out that the complexity of writing languages and compilers for it was not worth it, compared to just having good branch prediction.