I happened to notice that GCC 4.5 implements a new feature called "named address spaces", which seems to have come from ISO as a feature needed for various embedded processors. The initial implementation is for the SPU on Cell processors.
So my question: is AVR-GCC growing support for that?
It seems to me that "progmem" is a natural fit for this feature, and should be able to simplify one of the more annoying bits of AVR-GCC programming: accessing data stored in flash. Handling I/O addresses this way is less obviously advantageous; that's not so annoying today, but more standardized I/O access might help avoid some bugs.
Clearly, avr-libc support for that stuff would be a separate set of issues, with considerations like portability and backwards compatibility.
But it'd all need to be built on top of GCC support, which won't be in the 4.5 release. So ... maybe in GCC 4.6?