Work on ARM backend for DMD started

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 7/4/2017 2:25 PM, Stefan Koch wrote:
> At a first glance it looks highly x86 specific.

The algorithm is not. The details are, of course, since if you read the Intel 
CPU manual there is an incredible amount of detail.

> I am not sure how much of this really lends itself to be applied on arm.
> The backend-IR does not seem to be able to express some ARM concepts such as 
> predicated instructions.

Predicated instructions are just a larger pattern to the code generator. I 
didn't see anything in the LLVM IR that is specific to it.

> While those maybe shoehorned in, it is likely to be 
> impractical to reuse most of this code.

The algorithm (which is not trivial) can be used. The rest is constructing the 
table of dependencies and special cases.