Cross compilers; GDC/LDC

[David Nadlinger]

On Sunday, 3 March 2013 at 13:57:15 UTC, Manu wrote:
> Ideally, I would really like all these toolchains:
>  GDC: x86, x64, ARM, PPC, MIPS, SH4 <- common toolchains
>  LDC: x86, x64, ARM, PPC <- used by apple
>
> I wonder if anyone with know-how building GDC or LDC for 
> windows could help
> me out by producing as many of these in binary as possible?

My dev laptop is being repaired right now, but I hope I'll be 
able to upload a recent MinGW build of LDC by the end of the 
week. I could build LLVM with all targets enabled, so you could 
at least do some basic codegen tests by manually specifying the 
target triple.

See http://wiki.dlang.org/LDC for information on the ARM/PPC 
status. You might want to contact Kai directly, maybe he can 
easily provide you with a "real" PPC64 cross-compiler.


> As a side note, I think it would be really valuable to keep a 
> cache of such
> windows binaries somewhere on the net anyway, so anyone working 
> on foreign
> platforms can get to work and actually focus on platform 
> support, without
> wasting all their time learning how to build these toolchains.

In case of LDC, the main reason such binaries don't already 
exist, at least for the bare compiler, is that no Windows 
binaries exist at all (a MinGW preview will hopefully be 
available with the next release).

Keep in mind, though, that any serious porting effort will likely 
require changes to the compiler source (e.g. custom ABI 
transformations), so the benefit of binaries for this specific 
use case will probably be limited.

David