What are we going to do about mobile?

kinke via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Apr 6 02:39:05 PDT 2017


On Thursday, 6 April 2017 at 05:24:07 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> D is currently built and optimized for that dying PC platform.

I don't think x86 is dying soon, but I agree that embedded 
architectures get more important every day and should get more 
focus.

> I would even go so far as to say it may be worthwhile to 
> develop an ARM backend for dmd.

Wasted efforts in my view, there are so many other aspects 
regarding D which need to be worked on and polished, and we 
already have (unlike DMD, fully free!) D compilers able to target 
most architectures used on this planet (with varying level of 
support obviously, but at least the back-ends are already there). 
I really don't think DMD for ARM would increase D's popularity on 
embedded platforms in any way.

> More than anything else, we need the community to try building 
> mobile libraries and apps, because compiler support is largely 
> done.

What LDC would primarily need is a CI platform supporting ARM 
(and ideally AArch64) in order to make it a true first-class 
target. We don't know of a free CI platform, so ARM isn't tested 
automatically, and it's currently mostly up to poor you to check 
for regressions. ;(

Instead of working on an ARM backend for DMD, broadening the 
upstream runtime libraries for more architectures would make much 
more sense to me, as it's currently up to LDC and GDC with their 
severely limited manpower (and the even more limited available 
hardware to test on) to extend druntime/Phobos for non-x86 
platforms. E.g., for AArch64, Phobos fully supporting 
quad-precision floating-point math would make things easier for 
us. And full big-endian support in Phobos would be nice for 
PowerPC targets.


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