On , pulkomandy wrote:
Hello, The JavaScript interpreter in WebKit has started to make use of SSE2 features. For the previous releases, we advertised support for "i586" machines, which means SSE and SSE2 was not to be used, or detected at runtime. If we want to keep this low compatibility requirement, I will have to switch our WebKit port to the plain C code version of the JavaScript interpreter. This also means we lose the JIT capabilities, which willresult in a slower web browsing experience. This can only be switched atcompile time.What should we do? Increase our requirements to need a CPU with SSE2 forthe syste as a whole? Only for the web browser? Remove the JIT? Provide two versions of HaikuWebKit with different JavaScriptCore engines? I'd like to avoid the last option, which adds more work than seems reasonable (haikuwebkit would need to be built 5 times to support all our architectures: gcc2hybrid with and wouthout sse2, x86 with and without sse2, and x86_64).SSE2 was introduced with the Pentium 4 at Intel, and Athlon64 at AMD. SoPentium III, Athlon XP and anything older would be left out.
Leave SSE2 disabled on gcc2h, enable it on gcc4h? Same number of builds,
and encourages everyone to get off of gcc2 :P