By following the guidelines in the previous chapters, you can write code that is fully portable between the Alpha and x86 platforms. It should be possible to write almost any kind of application without writing code specific to either x86 or Alpha. However, the Alpha version of the compiler provides many platform-specific features that are useful in special situations.
Many Alpha-specific features have been added to take advantage of added capabilities or to better optimize your program when compiling for an Alpha processor. If you want to write portable code, use these features with care, and conditionally compile them within #ifdef blocks so that you don’t attempt compilation of Alpha-specific features on other platforms.
This chapter covers the following topics: