D on ARM

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrew Wiley" <wiley.andrew.j at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1177.1308888314.14074.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> So it seems that ARM is going to be getting quite a bit bigger in the
> future, between the rise of smarter phones and Windows 8 support, and in
> general D just doesn't exist on ARM.
> GDC kind of works, but I've been unable to come up with a simple test case
> for a bug with the section-anchors optimization, and fibers simply don't
> work (although that may be due to some bad alignment in the D versions of
> some C data structures that I haven't looked too far into yet).
>
> Aside from that, D is pretty much x86 specific. LDC builds on ARM but
> segfaults when trying to build DRuntime, and DMD only supports x86 
> codegen.
> All assembly in DRuntime is x86 specific.
>
> I realize I'm a lurker around here, and while I've tried to get GDC 
> working
> a bit better on ARM, I've been mostly unsuccessful, but should we, as a
> community, be making some sort of commitment to make this better? I'm not
> trying to be imposing (well, I am to some extent, but I realize I have no
> right to), but this seems like it will probably get much more important in
> the next few years.
>

Actually, I strongly agree with you. The idea of being able to use something 
better than C/C++ on ARM-level embedded devices is one of the major things 
that drew me to D in the first place, getting close to ten years ago now (I 
was doing some GBA homebrew at the time, and had to use C - it got the job 
done, but it was an anachronistic language even back then). It's kind of 
frustrating that we're still not really there yet (although I admit it's 
been years since I've really had a chance to do anything outside the 
desktop/server). And it's not just getting the basics working, but also 
being able to easily handle embedded-oriented concerns like being able to 
ban GC allocs at compiletime (GC would be inappropriate on something like 
the GBA/DS, for instance). I've always been *far* more interested in 
ARM/embedded issues than the x64/multicore/concurrency issues that have been 
getting most of the focus. So that's been frustrating for me to watch.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much I would personally be able to 
contribute to the cause :/ I know next-to-nothing about compiler backends, 
druntime, LLVM or GCC, and my ARM experience was years ago and was C-only 
without really delving into the asm (neither arm nor thumb).