Re: [PATCH 0/7] Support reading/writing memory on architectures with non 8-bits bytes

Simon Marchi
2015-04-10T17:34:03Z

>> I understand your concern. The term "byte" is probably set in stone as 8-bits for pretty
>> much everybody, so trying to redefine it as variable length would probably cause more harm
>> than good.
>
> But if you work on several platforms, you would reasonably be expected to understand each of them. Debugging on A, B, and C with a working knowledge only of A isn’t very realistic.
>
> 8 bits == byte is certainly the predominant modern usage, but it hasn’t always been that way and even today it apparently isn’t quite universal. GCC used to support architectures that did not do 8-bit byte memory addressing, though that capability seems to have faded away in the past couple of years.

I guess you are referring to older architectures with 6, 7, 9, 12, 36-bits or other
byte size. I'd like to make it clear that our goal is not to support that kind of
bytes that is not a multiple of 8 bits. That would be incredibly more complicated.