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.
