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> 32bit chars and 64bit shorts are theoretically possible

Indeed. I worked at Cambridge Silicon Radio. Their Bluetooth chips often had two processors: a XAP for the BT stack and a Kalimba DSP for audio processing. They had 16-bit and 24-bit chars respectively. About 1 billion such chips have been sold, so it's not just some wacky architecture invented by a mad bloke in a shed.




Writing code for the XAP2 processor from CSR gave me headaches. Did not help that the compiler is some old forked off version of GCC.


It's been a few years but it was GCC 3.3 as I remember, always being called in C89 mode. Worst part was that there was a debugger, but it couldn't actually be used. All you get is printf()


Thank god it's not GCC 2.95. I still have nightmares about embedded systems stuck on that compiler.


I still occasionally see the people responsible for that. I'll pass on your regards :-)




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