Do we want to allow intermixing 68000 and 68020-60 libraries or not ?
Personally, I don't.
Personally I don't, too. And IIRC Patrice even sent a patch for making linking explicit with a note he is going to apply/use anyway because he doesn't like it either. You see, we are three now! ;-)
But I agree, some binary libraries are not available for m68020-60. Anyway, they should be recompiled. An executable partially optimized for a specific CPU makes me sick.
Exactly. Do you get missing library error when compiling with -m68020-60? Go and get a one and don't think about workarounds.
To be compatible with equivalent code without FPU.
To allow mixing FPU and non-FPU code.
But only for one specific case: app is being compiled with -m68020-60 and we silently expect to be linked with 68000 libraries. Never the other way. Think about CF, this can make serious performance penalty (68000 math library will be linked with CF app, everything must be emulated etc).
How traditional Atari compilers return pointers and floats ?
Is this really important? Nobody is going to link AHCC/PureC libraries with gcc.
And what about vbcc ?
... except possibly vbcc. But since I worked on atari support with Frank, it's matter of one email to change to *any* desired behavior. vbcc even allows explicit parameter enumeration (return -> d3, param1 -> d0, param2 -> d5 for example) on source code level.
And another point: in the real world, no manually written assembler routine will return floats. float manipulation is usually done in C. With one exception, the libm
Uhm, not so fast, all amiga (game) sources/ports I ever touched do it :)