Ehem, ARM

[Michel Fortin]

On 2013-11-15 07:33:40 +0000, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> said:

> On 2013-11-15 02:50, Michel Fortin wrote:
> 
>> And since the DMD backend won't emit ARM code, if I were still working
>> on this the first thing I'd do is rebase everything to work on top of LDC.
> 
> I think that would be quite difficult. Although it would probably be 
> easier to get 64bit and modern runtime support. An advantage of doing 
> it in DMD (except that it's already in DMD) is that it's probably a 
> bigger chance of it being officially added to D and not just an 
> extension to LDD. If it's added to DMD it will automatically be merged 
> by both LDC and GDC.

That was my idea too initially: put it in the reference implementation 
and other implementations will follow, and it'll become part of the 
language. That'd be great. But it's hard when you have to fix the 
backend to emit what you need. I have some fears about that for the 
exception handling stuff in the modern runtime, perhaps they're 
unjustified.


> Another idea would be to add it to DMD with the current platform 
> support. Then when it's merged with LDC, let them add support for ARM, 
> 64bit and modern runtime.

I wonder if Walter will approve the merge, despite his stated intention 
to do so eventually. The surface area of that patch is huge, it'll take 
him many hours for an initial review, and probably several iterations 
of that review process will be required to get it to pass. I remember 
my smaller-scale pull request #3 that never got reviewed... but maybe 
(hopefully?) things have changed since then.


> BTW, do you automatically scan the newsgroups for 
> "http://michelf.ca/projects/d-objc/" :)

Haha. No. I skim by topic of interest. But I generally play the passive 
observer. Replying generally brings other replies, begging for more 
followup. I have a couple of replies that were written but which I 
never posted because I anticipated writing the eventual followups 
wouldn't be worth my time. It doesn't help that I tend to spend too 
much time carefully writing anything too, proofreading and weighing 
every word.

But if you're talking about one of my projects there's more chance I'll 
pop in the conversation.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca