TLS + LDC + Android (ARM) = FAIL

[Johannes Pfau]

Am Wed, 01 Nov 2017 19:24:42 +0000
schrieb Joakim <dlang at joakim.fea.st>:

> On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 18:28:12 UTC, Johannes Pfau 
> wrote:
> > ARM: Fine. Android: probably won't work well. AFAIK we're only 
> > missing emulated TLS / GC integration, so most test will pass 
> > but real apps will crash because of GC memory corruption. I 
> > guess I should finally get back to fixing that problem ;-) OTOH 
> > Android doesn't even support GCC anymore, so I don't really see 
> > much benefit in maintaining GDC Android support.  
> 
> I don't see what their deciding to drop gcc has to do with 
> whether gdc should support Android.

If there's a backend bug in GCC related to Android nobody will take
responsibility as it's not officially supported. All tutorials and
documentation will focus on LLVM based compilers. It's certainly still
interesting to use GDC for Android, but it is more work (especially
considering Android is one of the few systems requiring emutls) for
little benefit, especially if most users are going to use LLVM
anyway.

With the limited time available I think GDC should focus on systems
where GCC is a first class or even the preferred compiler.
X86/MIPS/ARM/PPC/Linux as some distributions such as debian might prefer
a GCC based compiler. Then there are embedded toolchains which
primarily use GCC: MSP and ARM (GCC Arm Embedded project). Also many
console homebrew toolchains exclusively use GCC.

I just don't think we have to support two compilers for any target
with the little resources we have.


-- Johannes