On Friday, 15 November 2013 at 11:18:06 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Friday, 15 November 2013 at 09:45:42 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
As far as I know dmd does not support cross compiling.
I started skimming the dmd source to see how it handled porting
to new platforms and I found the following:
* Linux Version
* -------------
* There are two main issues: hosting the compiler on linux,
* and generating (targetting) linux executables.
* The "linux" and "__GNUC__" macros control hosting issues
* for operating system and compiler dependencies, respectively.
* To target linux executables, use ELFOBJ for things specific
to the
* ELF object file format, and TARGET_LINUX for things specific
to
* the linux memory model.
* If this is all done right, one could generate a linux object
file
* even when compiling on win32, and vice versa.
* The compiler source code currently uses these macros very
inconsistently
* with these goals, and should be fixed.
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/blob/master/src/backend/cdef.h#L71
So it appears that the dmd backend has some support for
cross-compiling, although likely incomplete.
Hi Joakim!
Yes, there is a some support, but not too much. The existence of
the TARGET_* macros means that you can't have one compiler with 2
or more platform targets.
But there should be no real problem to create a dmd executable on
Linux/ARM producing object files for Windows/x86. (Well - no
problem except for the real data type. :-) ) But who needs that
kind of cross-compiling?
To be useful for producing ARM binaries, you need an ARM backend.
This is already available for LDC and GDC. IMHO it is easier to
pick one of those compilers and think about and create a
cross-compiling environment instead of starting by zero. (For
LDC, this is issue #490:
https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/490)
Regards,
Kai
