D on AArch64 CPU

[David J Kordsmeier via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 14 May 2017 at 15:05:08 UTC, Richard Delorme wrote:
> I recently bought the infamous Raspberry pi 3, which has got a 
> cortex-a53 4 cores 1.2 Ghz CPU (Broadcom). After installing on 
> it a 64 bit OS (a non official fedora 25), I was wondering if 
> it was possible to install a D compiler on it.
>

Richard, I would be interested in working through the GDC issues 
further with you if you haven't completely given up on this.  I 
am surprised the response is that there is still no official 
support.  I am struggling on nearly every project I have on 
aarch64 with really lagging support for a wide variety of 
software, mainly platform support in more complex builds that 
does not include aarch64, and clearly the compilers all need more 
core level work to bring up a language and programming toolchains 
in a new environment.  I think Go, for example, isn't fully 
supported on aarch64, and Rust has the same issue.

If you are still available, I would like to share notes on the 
GDC 6.3 work that you started, and see if we can work through the 
issues with the core team.  I realize there is probably some lack 
of visibility into the interest that exists in the ARM-embedded 
area for D, but I've been using gdc on ARM since 2014.  It has 
been reasonably good for me, however, with the migration of many 
device manufacturers to AARCH64, most notably the Raspi3 and all 
of the hordes of Android devices hitting the market, there is a 
substantial installed base.

I can commit some hardware to builds also, and have some contacts 
in the industry around arm stuff, so it shouldn't be hard to find 
more dedicated gear if this helps teams like the GDC team who may 
not have access to gear to even run nightly builds.

Honestly, I stopped using D when I ran into this issue, was 
hoping, as you, that "someone should fix this".  However, that's 
not how good OSS works, and I'm willing to put some cycles on it 
if there is a way forward.  At the time, I had to make some fast 
decisions and opted to rewrite my code base in C.  I look forward 
to hearing from you and anyone else interested in working 
on/contributing to this topic.

Also, why I don't look at LDC further, I think RAM on the 
embedded devices is still pretty skimpy, Raspi3 only has 1GB ram. 
  It's not great for compiling with the LLVM-based things and 
probably run OOM.  Other devices I have only have 512MB ram.  So 
gcc is usually fine in these circumstances.