ARM support

[Mike]

On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 18:07:16 UTC, Piotr Szturmaj wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm developing embedded system product on ARM9/Linux platform 
> and I wish I could use D and vibe.d for this task.

I'm new to D, so please take my comments below with that in mind. 
  I'm not really qualified to answer these questions, but I offer 
my perceptions anyway.

I'm working on a bare-metal ARM Cortex-M port, which I believe is 
quite different from what you are looking for.  What exactly is 
your hardware?  RaspberryPi? BeagleBone? Android Tablet?

> I have couple of questions in this matter:
> - What is the current status of ARM support?

I'm not really qualified to answer this question, but the D 
runtime has a few instances of "version(ARM)" in it, so it 
appears progress is being made.  In my limited experience with 
the D runtime, it appears that it is mostly dependent on the 
operating system and the C standard library than the underlying 
processor.  Since Linux support is solid, I'd bet it's not too 
far away.  Just needs someone to pick up the torch and carry it 
the extra distance.

LDC is trying to make some progress with exception handling 
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/mailman.186.1389078727.15871.digitalmars-d-ldc@puremagic.com).

I haven't gotten far enough to play with exception handling in 
GDC, but there's an interesting discussion going on here 
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/zpvivgzkpxvjlqiwucel@forum.dlang.org)


> - Does GDC support cross-compiling to ARM?

Yep.  Good documentation here 
(https://bitbucket.org/timosi/minlibd/wiki/gdc_cross_compiler).  
More documentation here 
(http://wiki.dlang.org/GDC/Cross_Compiler).  I had some trouble 
with it, but eventually succeeded. Discussion here 
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/l6t224$25j2$1@digitalmars.com)

> - Is it possible to remote-debug D code on ARM? (I've used GDB 
> for C++ remote debugging on ARM11, I think this should also 
> work with GDC compiled code)

I use OpenOCD and GDB with a JTAG emulator, and at least the few 
features I've used work.  Exciting GDB developments here 
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/wnipdgpohgjgmojokssy@forum.dlang.org)

> - Does druntime support ARM plaforms?

Not really qualified to answer this, but see my comment above.

> - Does phobos support ARM plaforms?

Again, not qualified to answer this, but I don't believe there's 
much dependency on the underlying hardware, just the OS and the D 
runtime.

> - Does GC run reliably on ARM (or is it platform independent)?

New to D, so not qualified to answer, but I'm guessing with OS 
support, the underlying hardware is not so relevant.  I think, 
however, the type of application you build will have an impact on 
(perceived) performance with the garbage collector, so 
programming technique is more important than the GC, IMO.

> - Can you estimate eventual cost of supporting D on ARM (think 
> of paid bounty).

For me, $40,000....OK. I'll take $30,000.

>
> Thanks for any help.

Sorry if I didn't really provide any.