DMD, LDC, and GDC compilers and 32/64 bit

[kinke via digitalmars-d-ldc]

On Monday, 19 June 2017 at 13:36:28 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 
wrote:
> On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 17:42:13 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
>> Both -m32 and -m64 are available on any host with LDC. 
>> However, usually you wouldn't find 64 bit standard libraries 
>> with a 32 bit build – not because of any technical reason, but 
>> just because multilib setups in that direction are far less 
>> useful/common.
>
> Beyond 32/64 bit, does this also affect practical support for 
> other target architectures (e.g. ARM)?
>
> Can you in any case point to some guidelines on how best to 
> build LDC so as to have the maximum possible target support 
> library-wise?  It would be good to try to ensure the snap 
> package supports this.

Well, library-wise all targets we can really support are the 
32/64-bit variants of the host. If we shipped our Linux x64 
package with ARM libs, it'd still depend on an external 
cross-linker and the ARM C libs, so bundling LDC with 
druntime/Phobos for a bunch of other targets doesn't seem to make 
a lot of sense (to me anyway).

Building static druntime/Phobos libs (generally or even on-demand 
when first targeting a new platform) for any target supported by 
the used LLVM would be easily possible on any host with latest 
LDC - if they didn't include any C parts, which unfortunately 
complicate matters.