On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 18:07:16 UTC, Piotr Szturmaj wrote:
Hello,
I'm developing embedded system product on ARM9/Linux platform
and I wish I could use D and vibe.d for this task.
I'm new to D, so please take my comments below with that in mind.
I'm not really qualified to answer these questions, but I offer
my perceptions anyway.
I'm working on a bare-metal ARM Cortex-M port, which I believe is
quite different from what you are looking for. What exactly is
your hardware? RaspberryPi? BeagleBone? Android Tablet?
I have couple of questions in this matter:
- What is the current status of ARM support?
I'm not really qualified to answer this question, but the D
runtime has a few instances of "version(ARM)" in it, so it
appears progress is being made. In my limited experience with
the D runtime, it appears that it is mostly dependent on the
operating system and the C standard library than the underlying
processor. Since Linux support is solid, I'd bet it's not too
far away. Just needs someone to pick up the torch and carry it
the extra distance.
LDC is trying to make some progress with exception handling
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]).
I haven't gotten far enough to play with exception handling in
GDC, but there's an interesting discussion going on here
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected])
- Does GDC support cross-compiling to ARM?
Yep. Good documentation here
(https://bitbucket.org/timosi/minlibd/wiki/gdc_cross_compiler).
More documentation here
(http://wiki.dlang.org/GDC/Cross_Compiler). I had some trouble
with it, but eventually succeeded. Discussion here
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected])
- Is it possible to remote-debug D code on ARM? (I've used GDB
for C++ remote debugging on ARM11, I think this should also
work with GDC compiled code)
I use OpenOCD and GDB with a JTAG emulator, and at least the few
features I've used work. Exciting GDB developments here
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected])
- Does druntime support ARM plaforms?
Not really qualified to answer this, but see my comment above.
- Does phobos support ARM plaforms?
Again, not qualified to answer this, but I don't believe there's
much dependency on the underlying hardware, just the OS and the D
runtime.
- Does GC run reliably on ARM (or is it platform independent)?
New to D, so not qualified to answer, but I'm guessing with OS
support, the underlying hardware is not so relevant. I think,
however, the type of application you build will have an impact on
(perceived) performance with the garbage collector, so
programming technique is more important than the GC, IMO.
- Can you estimate eventual cost of supporting D on ARM (think
of paid bounty).
For me, $40,000....OK. I'll take $30,000.
Thanks for any help.
Sorry if I didn't really provide any.
