Android build can't link _d_array

[Johannes Pfau]

Am Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:12:51 +0200
schrieb "Kris Dawson" <gnerdthe1 at gmail.com>:

> I expermented with building D for Android within a Debian chroot. 
> I was able to get D to build with GCC 4.7.1 under ARM. I went to 
> compile a test program with D   using the _Dmodule_ref shim and 
> nophoboslib flag, however in testing argv[0] to printf output, 
> the linker said it couldn't reference the _d_array_1 function or 
> something similar. I deleted the compiler out of frustation (I 
> spent a week getting it to build on arm). Did I have to manually 
> link gdruntime.a in afterthought?

IIRC the installation instructions and public repositories do not have a
working libdruntime yet. So you probably only have the compiler, but
not the runtime (that's also why the _Dmodule_ref hack is necessary).

Seems like accessing an array needs the _d_array_1 function, so that
doesn't work. You currently can do almost nothing without a runtime. I
hope that might change in the future or we would see tiny replacement
runtimes, but for now you need druntime for almost everything.

I gave up on Android for now (without TLS in Android and proper .so
support in D there's not much we can do), but I had druntime working.

I need to get all that old stuff cleaned up and post it somewhere so
it doesn't get lost,  but don't hold your breath as I don't have much
time for that right now.

BTW: If you only want to use D on ARM, try the Raspberry PI or the
PandaBoard, BeagleBoard, TrimSlice, etc. The problems described above
are Android problems, not ARM problems. There's one big problem with
all ARM devices (issue #120), but I have a fix which should be almost
ready. I just have to run the testsuite on a few architectures to make
sure there are no regressions.