RFC: On non 8-bit bytes and the target for it

[s-barannikov]

@bjope

I wouldn’t mind providing (or help out reviewing) patches upstream to reduce the amount of changes needed downstream for people having non-8-bit chars.

Thanks! This is my idea too.

@bjope

It is understood that since there is not target with for example 16 bit char in-tree, it is hard to motivate patches when they can’t be motivated by any test cases.

Middle end changes are easily tested without a target, so we can share at least this part now.

@bjope

Still, I don’t really see why the community should be opposed to minor refactorings (not impacting in-tree performance and neither impacting readability a lot) such as:

Yeah, me too. Perhaps that will change once the community sees the patches.

I will prepare a draft PR with changes to DataLayout, memset declaration, and a few examples of how the code will change with iN bytes support. This will take some time.