[cfe-dev] Casting scalars to vectors

[John Thompson]

According to the AltiVec standard (section 2.4.6 in
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/ALTIVECPIM.pdf), casting
a scalar to a vector is illegal, yet gcc seems to support it, as seen in
many of those little files in the PS3 SDK in target\ppu\include\bits, which
have statements like:

vec_uint4 mask = (vec_uint4)(vec_int4)(-1);
where vec_uint4 and vec_int4 are typedefs for vector types, i.e.:

typedef vector int vec_int4;

What does this actually do? I'm guessing it's supposed to fill the vector
components with -1.

How should this be handled in Clang?
I filed a Bugzilla bug 6846 on this.

If Clang should support it, I might be able to take a crack at it, with a
little guidance.

-- 
John Thompson
John.Thompson.JTSoftware at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/attachments/20100419/4beeaed6/attachment.html>