Work on ARM backend for DMD started

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 3 July 2017 at 23:16:07 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
> While I currently don't have an ARM based hardware that would 
> be easy to develop on, I'm planning to use QEMU to emulate some 
> form of ARMv6 CPU, as it'll be the main target, as it's still 
> being used in devices like the Raspberry Pi. ARMv5 is being 
> considered if it doesn't need a lot of work, although I don't 
> see a lot of reason behind doing it besides of the possibility 
> of enabling the development of homebrew GBA, NDS, GP32, etc 
> stuff.
>
> As I became unemployed recently, I have a lot more time for 
> development, so time now isn't an issue. Or at least until I 
> find a job, which is hard due to my state as a college student, 
> which I'm on the verge of losing it.
>
> I would accept your input on various things, like if I should 
> do some adjustments to the in-line assembly stuff, whether I 
> should care about thumb (reduced size instruction set, not 
> available on some newer targets) or not, etc. Got my hands on 
> some official reference manual, it wouldn't hurt if I could 
> research other ones too.

I'm aware that this is a topic that's occasionally brought up, 
but as someone is proposing to go from idea to implementation.  
It seems like a good time to point out.

Someone did this 5 years ago as part of splitting the backend 
into interfaces - or at least as a working concept that the new 
interfaces actually allowed you to implement a new target.

Maybe you should use their work as a starting or reference point. 
  You'd probably save yourself most the trouble of working out how 
things connect.

Iain.