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.
