iphone + LDC, a new ARM adventure

[Dan Olson]

Compiling LDC for iphone ARM. Running into expected problems, but
thought I'd post status so I am not working in a vacuum. I am new to
building LLVM as of this week so more likely to miss configuration
options.

During the LDC build, druntime and phobos run into a few problems (3
types of error), which don't suprise me because I don't think many have
tried this combo yet (arm-apple-darwin). However, I can compile a simple
standalone .d file to .o and link it into an xcode iphone arm project
and run it on hardware.

First class of error I run into is exception based. Any code that needs
to handle exceptions gets this:

Assertion failed: (getOperand(0)->getType() == cast<PointerType>(getOperand(1)->getType())->getElementType() && "Ptr must be a pointer to Val type!"), function AssertOK, file /Users/dan/projects/ldc/llvm-3.3.src/lib/IR/Instructions.cpp, line 1084.
... snip
0.	Running pass 'SJLJ Exception Handling preparation' on function '@_D4core8demangle8Demangle9parseTypeMFAaZAa'
/bin/sh: line 1: 53946 Illegal instruction: 4  /Users/dan/projects/ldc/buildldc-3.3-hacked-armv7/bin/ldc2 --output-o -c -I/Users/dan/projects/ldc/ldc-0.12.1-src/runtime/druntime/src -I/Users/dan/projects/ldc/ldc-0.12.1-src/runtime/druntime/src/gc /Users/dan/projects/ldc/ldc-0.12.1-src/runtime/druntime/src/core/demangle.d -of/Users/dan/projects/ldc/buildldc-3.3-hacked-armv7/runtime/src/core/demangle.o -w -d -march=thumb -relocation-model=static -O3 -release -disable-invariants

Any thoughts?

Dan

----

Build machine is Lion using clang x86_64-apple-darwin12.5.0

I tried various LLVM --target configurations (arm, armv7,
x86-apple-darwin), but they do not seem to make a difference in the
resulting ldc2. LLVM 3.3 yields fewer errors when build druntime than
3.2.  Both give me the same exception error above.

I am using -march=thumb -relocation-model=static as I seem to encounter
fewer llvm failures with these flags. I updated
ldc-0.12.1-src/runtime/CMakeLists.txt and changed D_FLAGS to include
these.

The compiler reports this:

/Users/dan/projects/ldc/buildldc-3.3-hacked-armv7/bin/ldmd2 -help
LDC - the LLVM D compiler (0.12.0):
  based on DMD v2.063.2 and LLVM 3.3
  Default target: armv7-apple-darwin12.5.0
  Host CPU: corei7-avx
  http://dlang.org - http://wiki.dlang.org/LDC

  Registered Targets:
    aarch64  - AArch64
    arm      - ARM
    cpp      - C++ backend
    hexagon  - Hexagon
    mblaze   - MBlaze
    mips     - Mips
    mips64   - Mips64 [experimental]
    mips64el - Mips64el [experimental]
    mipsel   - Mipsel
    msp430   - MSP430 [experimental]
    nvptx    - NVIDIA PTX 32-bit
    nvptx64  - NVIDIA PTX 64-bit
    ppc32    - PowerPC 32
    ppc64    - PowerPC 64
    sparc    - Sparc
    sparcv9  - Sparc V9
    systemz  - SystemZ
    thumb    - Thumb
    x86      - 32-bit X86: Pentium-Pro and above
    x86-64   - 64-bit X86: EM64T and AMD64
    xcore    - XCore


Background:

About a year ago, I worked and gave up on making gdc build druntime and
phobos for iphone (ios arm). I could get a simple standalone D function
to run on an iphone but no further.

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/D/gnu/iphone_D_getting_closer_4788.html

The problem was that gcc-4.8 had no support for iphone and the latest
sources that apple released were for gcc-4.2. I tried in vain to merge
the iphone changes into 4.8, but it was a losing battle.

I have always wanted to continue this adventure, trying LDC. Apple is
all clang/LLVM now and seems to be pushing out some of their LLVM
updates.  So seems LDC is way to go!