I don't think being architecture-specific is necessarily a bad thing in
compilers, although most compiler writers obviously try to avoid it.
The kernel shouldn't really care: it does want to have a compiler with
support for inline functions, but other than that it's fairly close to
ANSI C.
Yes, I know we use a _lot_ of gcc extensions (inline asms, variadic macros
etc), but that's at least partly because there simply aren't any really
viable alternatives to gcc, so we've had no incentives to abstract any of
that out.
So the gcc'isms aren't really fundamental per se. Although, quite frankly,
even inline asms are pretty much a "standard" thing for any reasonable C
compiler (since C is often used for things that really want it), and the
main issue tends to be the exact syntax rather than anything else. So I
don't think I'd like to use a compiler that is _so_ limited that it
doesn't have some support for something like that. I certainly would
refuse to use a C compiler that didn't support inline functions.
Linus
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