gcc.info: Cross-Compiler Problems

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Cross-Compiler Problems

   You may run into problems with cross compilation on certain machines,
for several reasons.
   * Cross compilation can run into trouble for certain machines because
     some target machines' assemblers require floating point numbers to
     be written as *integer* constants in certain contexts.
     The compiler writes these integer constants by examining the
     floating point value as an integer and printing that integer,
     because this is simple to write and independent of the details of
     the floating point representation.  But this does not work if the
     compiler is running on a different machine with an incompatible
     floating point format, or even a different byte-ordering.
     In addition, correct constant folding of floating point values
     requires representing them in the target machine's format.  (The C
     standard does not quite require this, but in practice it is the
     only way to win.)
     It is now possible to overcome these problems by defining macros
     such as `REAL_VALUE_TYPE'.  But doing so is a substantial amount of
     work for each target machine.  *Note Cross-compilation::.
   * At present, the program `mips-tfile' which adds debug support to
     object files on MIPS systems does not work in a cross compile
     environment.