Now here's an interesting target for D - this little beast could sell in millions, and could be the way that many youngsters start out as programmers.

Presumably LDC would be the quickest thing to get on there?

Steve

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:10 PM, Steve Teale <steve.teale@britseyeview.com> wrote:
> Now here's an interesting target for D - this little beast could sell in millions, and could be the way that many youngsters start out as programmers.
>
> Presumably LDC would be the quickest thing to get on there?
>
> Steve

GDC on ARM has been working reasonably well for a while now (although I get an ICE when building the latest trunk - still trying to come up with enough information for a bug report). There's one major bug that requires the section-anchors optimization to be disabled.

Last I tried LDC on ARM, it built and segfaulted when building the standard library. GCC code generation for ARM is apparently significantly better than LLVM, so I haven't looked much farther into LDC.

On Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:26:40 -0800, Andrew Wiley wrote:
> GDC on ARM has been working reasonably well for a while now (although I get an ICE when building the latest trunk - still trying to come up with enough information for a bug report). There's one major bug that requires the section-anchors optimization to be disabled.
> 
> Last I tried LDC on ARM, it built and segfaulted when building the standard library. GCC code generation for ARM is apparently significantly better than LLVM, so I haven't looked much farther into LDC.

I'm going to get my son in England to see if he can get one in January, then I'll see if I can get GDC to work on it.

Steve

On 2011-12-24 08:26, Andrew Wiley wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:10 PM, Steve Teale
> <steve.teale@britseyeview.com>  wrote:
>> Now here's an interesting target for D - this little beast could sell in
>> millions, and could be the way that many youngsters start out as
>> programmers.
>>
>> Presumably LDC would be the quickest thing to get on there?
>>
>> Steve
>
> GDC on ARM has been working reasonably well for a while now (although
> I get an ICE when building the latest trunk - still trying to come up
> with enough information for a bug report). There's one major bug that
> requires the section-anchors optimization to be disabled.
>
> Last I tried LDC on ARM, it built and segfaulted when building the
> standard library. GCC code generation for ARM is apparently
> significantly better than LLVM, so I haven't looked much farther into
> LDC.

LLVM can't be that bad since it's good enough for Apple and they're abandoning GCC in favor of Clang and LLVM.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> wrote:
> On 2011-12-24 08:26, Andrew Wiley wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:10 PM, Steve Teale <steve.teale@britseyeview.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Now here's an interesting target for D - this little beast could sell in
>>>
>>> millions, and could be the way that many youngsters start out as programmers.
>>>
>>> Presumably LDC would be the quickest thing to get on there?
>>>
>>> Steve
>>
>>
>> GDC on ARM has been working reasonably well for a while now (although I get an ICE when building the latest trunk - still trying to come up with enough information for a bug report). There's one major bug that requires the section-anchors optimization to be disabled.
>>
>> Last I tried LDC on ARM, it built and segfaulted when building the standard library. GCC code generation for ARM is apparently significantly better than LLVM, so I haven't looked much farther into LDC.
>
>
> LLVM can't be that bad since it's good enough for Apple and they're abandoning GCC in favor of Clang and LLVM.
>

I'm looking into it again, apparently it's improved dramatically on ARM in the last few years. The compiler itself builds, but Druntime needs some ARM-specific assembly. Working on that.

On 2011-12-24 17:20, Andrew Wiley wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Jacob Carlborg<doob@me.com>  wrote:
>> On 2011-12-24 08:26, Andrew Wiley wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:10 PM, Steve Teale
>>> <steve.teale@britseyeview.com>    wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Now here's an interesting target for D - this little beast could sell in
>>>>
>>>> millions, and could be the way that many youngsters start out as
>>>> programmers.
>>>>
>>>> Presumably LDC would be the quickest thing to get on there?
>>>>
>>>> Steve
>>>
>>>
>>> GDC on ARM has been working reasonably well for a while now (although
>>> I get an ICE when building the latest trunk - still trying to come up
>>> with enough information for a bug report). There's one major bug that
>>> requires the section-anchors optimization to be disabled.
>>>
>>> Last I tried LDC on ARM, it built and segfaulted when building the
>>> standard library. GCC code generation for ARM is apparently
>>> significantly better than LLVM, so I haven't looked much farther into
>>> LDC.
>>
>>
>> LLVM can't be that bad since it's good enough for Apple and they're
>> abandoning GCC in favor of Clang and LLVM.
>>
>
> I'm looking into it again, apparently it's improved dramatically on
> ARM in the last few years. The compiler itself builds, but Druntime
> needs some ARM-specific assembly. Working on that.

Yeah, both LLVM and Clang are progressed rapidly.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 24-12-2011 17:20, Andrew Wiley wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Jacob Carlborg<doob@me.com>  wrote:
>> On 2011-12-24 08:26, Andrew Wiley wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:10 PM, Steve Teale
>>> <steve.teale@britseyeview.com>    wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Now here's an interesting target for D - this little beast could sell in
>>>>
>>>> millions, and could be the way that many youngsters start out as
>>>> programmers.
>>>>
>>>> Presumably LDC would be the quickest thing to get on there?
>>>>
>>>> Steve
>>>
>>>
>>> GDC on ARM has been working reasonably well for a while now (although
>>> I get an ICE when building the latest trunk - still trying to come up
>>> with enough information for a bug report). There's one major bug that
>>> requires the section-anchors optimization to be disabled.
>>>
>>> Last I tried LDC on ARM, it built and segfaulted when building the
>>> standard library. GCC code generation for ARM is apparently
>>> significantly better than LLVM, so I haven't looked much farther into
>>> LDC.
>>
>>
>> LLVM can't be that bad since it's good enough for Apple and they're
>> abandoning GCC in favor of Clang and LLVM.
>>
>
> I'm looking into it again, apparently it's improved dramatically on
> ARM in the last few years. The compiler itself builds, but Druntime
> needs some ARM-specific assembly. Working on that.

You may want to have a peek at GDC's druntime, as it is (mostly) ARM-ready. Could probably lift some code from there.

- Alex

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Alex Rønne Petersen <xtzgzorex@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24-12-2011 17:20, Andrew Wiley wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Jacob Carlborg<doob@me.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2011-12-24 08:26, Andrew Wiley wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:10 PM, Steve Teale <steve.teale@britseyeview.com>    wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Now here's an interesting target for D - this little beast could sell in
>>>>>
>>>>> millions, and could be the way that many youngsters start out as programmers.
>>>>>
>>>>> Presumably LDC would be the quickest thing to get on there?
>>>>>
>>>>> Steve
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> GDC on ARM has been working reasonably well for a while now (although I get an ICE when building the latest trunk - still trying to come up with enough information for a bug report). There's one major bug that requires the section-anchors optimization to be disabled.
>>>>
>>>> Last I tried LDC on ARM, it built and segfaulted when building the standard library. GCC code generation for ARM is apparently significantly better than LLVM, so I haven't looked much farther into LDC.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> LLVM can't be that bad since it's good enough for Apple and they're abandoning GCC in favor of Clang and LLVM.
>>>
>>
>> I'm looking into it again, apparently it's improved dramatically on ARM in the last few years. The compiler itself builds, but Druntime needs some ARM-specific assembly. Working on that.
>
>
> You may want to have a peek at GDC's druntime, as it is (mostly) ARM-ready. Could probably lift some code from there.
>
> - Alex

If I wanted that, I'd have to dig into GCC's platform specific source
(not GDC). Where pushing a thread's state onto the stack in GCC
consists of:
__builtin_unwind_init();

LLVM and DMD have to write some platform specific assembly. Still, I could probably find GCC's assembly definitions for ARM.