Changes:
– Various fixes to make Orc more portable
– Major performance improvements to NEON backend
– Minor performance improvements to SSE backend
– Major improvements to ARM backend, now passes regression
tests.
The defaults for floating point operations have been changed
somewhat: NANs are handled more like the IEEE 754 standard,
and denormals in operations are treated as zeros. The NAN
changes causes certain SSE operations to be slightly slower,
but produce less surprising results. Treating denormals as
zero has effects ranging from “slightly faster” to “now possible”.
New tool: orc-bugreport. Mainly this is to provide a limited
testing tool in the field, especially for embedded targets
which would not have access to the testsuite that is not
installed.
The environment variable ORC_CODE can now be used to adjust
some code generation. See orc-bugreport –help for details.
orcc has a new option to generate code that is compatible
with older versions of Orc. For example, if your software
package only uses 0.4.5 features, you can use –compat 0.4.5
to generate code that run on 0.4.5, otherwise it may generate
code that requires 0.4.6. Useful for generating source code
for distribution.
New NEON detection relies on Linux 2.6.29 or later.
Plans for 0.4.7: (not that past predictions have been at all
accurate) New opcodes for FIR filtering, scaling and compositing
of images and video. Instruction scheduler, helpful for non-OOO
CPUs. Minor SSE/NEON improvements. Orcc generation of inline
macros.