Condition codes in GCC are represented as registers, which provides better schedulability for architectures that do have a condition code register, but on which most instructions do not affect it. The latter category includes most RISC machines.
Implicit clobbering would pose a strong restriction on the placement of
the definition and use of the condition code. In the past the definition
and use were always adjacent. However, recent changes to support trapping
arithmetic may result in the definition and user being in different blocks.
Thus, there may be a NOTE_INSN_BASIC_BLOCK between them. Additionally,
the definition may be the source of exception handling edges.
These restrictions can prevent important optimizations on some machines. For example, on the IBM RS/6000, there is a delay for taken branches unless the condition code register is set three instructions earlier than the conditional branch. The instruction scheduler cannot perform this optimization if it is not permitted to separate the definition and use of the condition code register.
If there is a specific
condition code register in the machine, use a hard register. If the
condition code or comparison result can be placed in any general register,
or if there are multiple condition registers, use a pseudo register.
Registers used to store the condition code value will usually have a mode
that is in class MODE_CC.
Alternatively, you can use BImode if the comparison operator is
specified already in the compare instruction. In this case, you are not
interested in most macros in this section.