On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 03:10:41 UTC, Seiji Emery wrote:
> addendum:
>
> yes, this means you'd be stuck w/ an apple dev kit (and need to be a registered apple developer so the full cost of getting this is ~$600)
>
> but this is probably your best bet, by far, for getting a full, working developer environment on an arm chipset atm, outside of running an old surface tablet w/ windows RT, or running a linux distro off a phone, or something.

Nvidia is selling pretty popular solutions based on ARM and Nvidia GPU, all linux powered.
You really don't need to rely on a Phone or (ugh) old surface tablets ...

> it'd be pretty interesting to see if dmd can run on this out of the box, and what problems (if any) there might be with that. (intrinsics? threading? runtime code modification??)
> For porting bits of dmd and/or druntime and/or toolchain stuff to arm, I'm not sure you could do better than working on a pretty powerful arm chip that can run both arm *and* x86_64 code

Again, LDC runs out of the box on ARM since a long time now ... just check on the release page for the available tarred distributions
> You'd be stuck w/ macos ofc, but I'm pretty sure you could do quite a bit worse on that front in terms of having a real, working desktop development environment, that can run real dev tools and w/ performance that will probably not suck. no visual studio, but eh, vscode should work (hopefully), and there's intellij stuff. and there's xcode, which... if nothing else has pretty good debugging and profiling tools, and can be run on d binaries if you're sufficiently motivated and/or desperate

A 35$ Raspberry PI supports 2x 4K display, and comes with a Debian based linux complete with GUI. You can attach a keyboard, mouse and have a little ARM machine to toy with (but no precompiled LDC, its 32bit ...)

There are plenty of solutions, without having to rely on Apple!

(Disclaimer, message written on my 2019 iMac, eheh)

/P

Hardware: if IO speeds matter, ASUS has Tinkerboards with dual-channel RAM - I think those are rare in ARM land.

Form factor: realizing the market for SBC's, there are amd64 SBC's now like the lattepanda (soldered RAM, like most SBC's).

dmd: does its backend play a big role in compilation speed? Would maintaining a fork of a backend from somewhere else (SBCL?) provide wider platform support without harming dmd performance? RISC-V is behind ARM on the horizon.

ARM may be urgent, if say, the Pinebook, takes off among developers.

On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 13:39:57 UTC, Yatheendra wrote:
> Hardware: if IO speeds matter, ASUS has Tinkerboards with dual-channel RAM - I think those are rare in ARM land.
>
> Form factor: realizing the market for SBC's, there are amd64 SBC's now like the lattepanda (soldered RAM, like most SBC's).
>
> dmd: does its backend play a big role in compilation speed? Would maintaining a fork of a backend from somewhere else (SBCL?) provide wider platform support without harming dmd performance? RISC-V is behind ARM on the horizon.
>
> ARM may be urgent, if say, the Pinebook, takes off among developers.

Also, if developing for the host processor on FPGA's could be of enough interest, most FPGA's only have ARM (or Synopsys ARC, or MIPS) host processors - even the Intel-owned Altera FPGA's, I guess.

On 02/07/2020 1:39 AM, Yatheendra wrote:
> ARM may be urgent, if say, the Pinebook, takes off among developers.

ldc and gdc are a thing.

We are ok.

On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 14:11:18 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 02/07/2020 1:39 AM, Yatheendra wrote:
>> ARM may be urgent, if say, the Pinebook, takes off among developers.
>
> ldc and gdc are a thing.
>
> We are ok.

One might not think so if reading this forum. There are enough real problems to worry about without adding pretend ones on top.

On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 08:22:25 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:

>
> A 35$ Raspberry PI supports 2x 4K display, and comes with a Debian based linux complete with GUI. You can attach a keyboard, mouse and have a little ARM machine to toy with (but no precompiled LDC, its 32bit ...)

What do you mean by "no precompiled LDC?"

Just `sudo apt install ldc` and you go....

ldc2 --version
LDC - the LLVM D compiler (1.12.0):
  based on DMD v2.082.1 and LLVM 6.0.1
  built with LDC - the LLVM D compiler (1.12.0)
  Default target: armv6-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
  Host CPU: cortex-a72
  http://dlang.org - http://wiki.dlang.org/LDC

On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 15:48:59 UTC, Martin Tschierschke wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 08:22:25 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>
>>
>> A 35$ Raspberry PI supports 2x 4K display, and comes with a Debian based linux complete with GUI. You can attach a keyboard, mouse and have a little ARM machine to toy with (but no precompiled LDC, its 32bit ...)
>
> What do you mean by "no precompiled LDC?"
>
> Just `sudo apt install ldc` and you go....
>
> ldc2 --version
> LDC - the LLVM D compiler (1.12.0):
>   based on DMD v2.082.1 and LLVM 6.0.1
>   built with LDC - the LLVM D compiler (1.12.0)
>   Default target: armv6-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
>   Host CPU: cortex-a72
>   http://dlang.org - http://wiki.dlang.org/LDC

Cool, (a little outdated) but cool!

Usually we use the tar from the release page of the LDC GitHub page, but good to know LDC it's available also on that platform!

Thank you Martin for the info!

On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 14:27:21 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 14:11:18 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
>> On 02/07/2020 1:39 AM, Yatheendra wrote:
>>> ARM may be urgent, if say, the Pinebook, takes off among developers.
>>
>> ldc and gdc are a thing.
>>
>> We are ok.
>
> One might not think so if reading this forum. There are enough real problems to worry about without adding pretend ones on top.

If dmd and its scripting-like development cycle speed stops being the primary entry point for newbies, it is a "pretend one". Until then, it doesn't seem to be a dismissible problem. Again, until a Pinebook or an ARM Macbook/Mini becomes a developer preference, there is no urgency for the "dmd experience on ARM".

On 7/1/20 12:27 PM, Yatheendra wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 14:27:21 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 14:11:18 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
>>> On 02/07/2020 1:39 AM, Yatheendra wrote:
>>>> ARM may be urgent, if say, the Pinebook, takes off among developers.
>>>
>>> ldc and gdc are a thing.
>>>
>>> We are ok.
>>
>> One might not think so if reading this forum. There are enough real problems to worry about without adding pretend ones on top.
> 
> If dmd and its scripting-like development cycle speed stops being the primary entry point for newbies, it is a "pretend one". Until then, it doesn't seem to be a dismissible problem. Again, until a Pinebook or an ARM Macbook/Mini becomes a developer preference, there is no urgency for the "dmd experience on ARM".

It may not be a dismissable problem, but it's also not someone anyone but Walter can fix. So the question from a community standpoint is (allowing that we have really no control over this), is it worth having Walter create an entirely new backend instead of doing other work? I'd say no.

Unless someone else knows how to make this happen?

Another approach may be to figure out a way to make a non-optimized build with ldc run as fast as or close to dmd.

-Steve

On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 16:27:27 UTC, Yatheendra wrote:

> If dmd and its scripting-like development cycle speed stops being the primary entry point for newbies, it is a "pretend one". Until then, it doesn't seem to be a dismissible problem. Again, until a Pinebook or an ARM Macbook/Mini becomes a developer preference, there is no urgency for the "dmd experience on ARM".

DMD brings a lot of value with its fast compilation speed. I don't see D losing all of its value without fast compilation, though, and I don't see ARM taking over the developer world any time soon. There's no reason you can't compile on a "normal" computer in the early stages and then move over to ARM for the final stages using LDC. I have trouble believing there will be a lot of exclusively ARM development going on anytime soon.

Just today there was a story posted where Linus said "Over the last 10 years or so I've been complaining about the fact that it's really hard to find Arm hardware that is usable for a developer," Torvalds responded. Everything about this being the end of the D programming language is speculative if the Linux kernel doesn't even support ARM as a first class citizen.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/30/hard_to_find_linux_maintainers_says_torvalds/