What's the current state of MIPS compiling for bare metal? Especially the R4300i processor. I see MIPS on both GDC and LDC "partial support/bare metal" lists but them being somewhat vague about it I'm not quite sure which it means and I'm sure by now the processors and instruction sets are different from what they were in 1995.

Thanks,
April.

On Wednesday, 19 February 2020 at 07:09:02 UTC, April wrote:
> What's the current state of MIPS compiling for bare metal? Especially the R4300i processor. I see MIPS on both GDC and LDC "partial support/bare metal" lists but them being somewhat vague about it I'm not quite sure which it means and I'm sure by now the processors and instruction sets are different from what they were in 1995.
>
> Thanks,
> April.

Unfortunately, the current state is objectively unknown, as MIPS is not part of the architectures that we do continuous integration testing on. I suggest trying to run the compiler/druntime/phobos tests on MIPS (either real hardware, or emulator) to see what works at this moment. It is likely that for bare metal enough of the language would be stable and working correctly, but we can't know for sure.

You can follow the instructions to cross-compile with LDC:
https://wiki.dlang.org/Building_LDC_runtime_libraries

And for GDC:
https://wiki.dlang.org/GDC_Cross_Compiler

If you need specific help any of those compilers, I suggest asking for help in their respective sections of the forum/newsgroup.

On Wednesday, 19 February 2020 at 07:09:02 UTC, April wrote:
> What's the current state of MIPS compiling for bare metal? Especially the R4300i processor.

I've had some success with running D code on Nintendo 64 emulators, which emulate a R4300i processor. I'm compiling with:

ldc2 -march=mips -mcpu=mips3 -output-o -betterC -c sourcefile.d

And then use a custom linker to inject the segments.
Some of the issues I came across:
- global variables should be marked __gshared or immutable to avoid thread-local storage.
- LDC sometimes inserts calls to memcpy, memset and memcmp, so I provided implementations for those
- double precision floating point code does not work, only single precision
- functions returning large structs by value was not supported

Apart from that it worked decently. I'm not sure what kind of support your looking for exactly, but I suggest just giving it a try and see how far you get.

On Wednesday, 19 February 2020 at 07:09:02 UTC, April wrote:
> What's the current state of MIPS compiling for bare metal?

For LDC, bare metal should hardly be a problem; most druntime/Phobos tests apparently pass, see https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/2995.

Thanks all, much appreciated!