Android build can't link _d_array

[Kris Dawson]

On Wednesday, 19 September 2012 at 17:56:55 UTC, Johannes Pfau 
wrote:
> Am Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:12:51 +0200
> schrieb "Kris Dawson" <gnerdthe1 at gmail.com>:
>
>> I expermented with building D for Android within a Debian 
>> chroot. I was able to get D to build with GCC 4.7.1 under ARM. 
>> I went to compile a test program with D   using the 
>> _Dmodule_ref shim and nophoboslib flag, however in testing 
>> argv[0] to printf output, the linker said it couldn't 
>> reference the _d_array_1 function or something similar. I 
>> deleted the compiler out of frustation (I spent a week getting 
>> it to build on arm). Did I have to manually link gdruntime.a 
>> in afterthought?
>
> IIRC the installation instructions and public repositories do 
> not have a
> working libdruntime yet. So you probably only have the 
> compiler, but
> not the runtime (that's also why the _Dmodule_ref hack is 
> necessary).
>
> Seems like accessing an array needs the _d_array_1 function, so 
> that
> doesn't work. You currently can do almost nothing without a 
> runtime. I
> hope that might change in the future or we would see tiny 
> replacement
> runtimes, but for now you need druntime for almost everything.
>
> I gave up on Android for now (without TLS in Android and proper 
> .so
> support in D there's not much we can do), but I had druntime 
> working.
>
> I need to get all that old stuff cleaned up and post it 
> somewhere so
> it doesn't get lost,  but don't hold your breath as I don't 
> have much
> time for that right now.
>
> BTW: If you only want to use D on ARM, try the Raspberry PI or 
> the
> PandaBoard, BeagleBoard, TrimSlice, etc. The problems described 
> above
> are Android problems, not ARM problems. There's one big problem 
> with
> all ARM devices (issue #120), but I have a fix which should be 
> almost
> ready. I just have to run the testsuite on a few architectures 
> to make
> sure there are no regressions.

Ok, was just making sure. I wanted to focus on Android because of 
the range of devices (specifically tablets are my interest).
I believe full Linux for tablets and phones is the next step in 
those devices being adopted as full computing environments. The 
iOS and Win 8 proprietary options are purposely still too limited 
(especially the first).