actually this is just to avoid gcc being stupid and refusing to inline
the function version, even when the size cost is essentially identical
whether it's inlined or not.
the arm syscall abi requires 64-bit arguments to be aligned on an even
register boundary. these new macros facilitate meeting the abi
requirement without imposing significant ugliness on the code.
really wchar_t should never vary, but the ARM EABI defines it as an
unsigned 32-bit int instead of a signed one, and gcc follows this
nonsense. thus, to give a conformant environment, we have to follow
(otherwise L""[0] and L'\0' would be 0U rather than 0, but the
application would be unaware due to a mismatched definition for
WCHAR_MIN and WCHAR_MAX, and Bad Things could happen with respect to
signed/unsigned comparisons, promotions, etc.).
fortunately no rules are imposed by the C standard on the relationship
between wchar_t and wint_t, and WEOF has type wint_t, so we can still
make wint_t always-signed and use -1 for WEOF.
this port assumes eabi calling conventions, eabi linux syscall
convention, and presence of the kernel helpers at 0xffff0f?0 needed
for threads support. otherwise it makes very few assumptions, and the
code should work even on armv4 without thumb support, as well as on
systems with thumb interworking. the bits headers declare this a
little endian system, but as far as i can tell the code should work
equally well on big endian.
some small details are probably broken; so far, testing has been
limited to qemu/aboriginal linux.
Rich Felker