Building for ARM with LDC

[Joakim via digitalmars-d-ldc]

On Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 01:56:04 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Wednesday, 13 August 2014 at 16:21:28 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
>> Cross-compiling druntime/phobos is possible but untried. You
>> could try to setup host and target compilers in CMakeList.txt 
>> or
>> you could build a small script to compile all .d modules into a
>> library. There is no out-of-the-box solution.
>> (Currently I build ldc on an ARM box and avoid the cross
>> compiling scenario.)
>
> OK, I figured.  I'll try something similar to what Dan did on 
> iOS (http://forum.dlang.org/thread/m2txc2kqxv.fsf@comcast.net), 
> as he didn't have that native compilation option either.

An update: by simply following in Dan's footsteps for iOS, but 
with slightly different flags for linux/ARM, I've been able to 
build an x86 ldc binary and an ARM druntime/phobos in a linux/x86 
VM and deploy to a linux/ARM device. :)

I'm able to build the dmd sample program sieve.d for ARMv7 with 
all three combinations of ldc alone, ldc and druntime, and ldc 
and phobos, with small modifications to sieve.d for writing 
output for each case.  The first two combos produce an executable 
that runs fine on linux/ARM, the one with phobos seems to run and 
then prints out junk output.

I had to apply the real/long-double pull #643 to get phobos to 
compile for ARM.  Right now, I push the objects and static 
libraries to the linux/ARM target and link them using the native 
linker, as I didn't want to mess with trying to figure out how to 
get the x86 linker to link for ARM yet.

I'm going to try cross-compiling and running the unit tests next. 
  What should I expect?

I'll try merging David's old patch for ARM exception-handling 
from issue #489 at some point.