On Friday, 9 March 2018 at 03:09:16 UTC, dangbinghoo wrote:
hi all,
I think the D community should make more effort to make Dlang
more easier to use on embedded Linux(mostly are arm and mips,
powerpc).
currently, LDC seems to be more complete, but we can only see a
hundred words on the wiki about the cross-compiling for arm.
A wiki search shows me dozens of pages that mention ARM:
https://wiki.dlang.org/?search=arm
Maybe you're talking about the ARM section in the main LDC page,
but that links to those other pages.
I'm working in a company now for IOT market. We have a lot of
things like embedded linux systems: has a basic linux kernel,
uclibc/eglibc system, built using buildroot or yocto.
for such a device, we need to write lost of code for dealing
networking, web interface, database storage and sometimes data
algorithm.
And, For most of the devices on the market, like routers,
fiber-port routers, ethernet switches, and most of the
termination system made by Cisco, Broadcom, Huawei and others
running at least millions of lines of C code on the embedded
linux system.
So, We have very big chance for spreading to these market. D is
really syntax-clean and provides more productive.
You will be interested in the uClibc port that's being finished
up upstream and will likely be in the upconing ldc 1.9 then,
along with the betterC version of D that is supported by ldc
(assuming you can't use the D runtime and garbage-collector):
https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/2134
https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html
We need tutorial for cross-compiling a whole d project for the
ARM, MIPS linux systems, and we need the cross-compile
toolchain ready to download.
so, any ideas?
You should talk to Mike and Radu, they have both expressed
interest in this and are working towards taking D there:
https://github.com/jinshil
https://github.com/rracariu
As for the cross-compile toolchain, we can make ldc work for
these platforms, but you will likely always need to download the
existing C cross-compilation toolchain for these embedded
platforms separately, as we rely on the existing linker for these
platforms to link D executables. Also, there are a few C and
assembly source files in the D runtime that require a C
cross-compiler to build, so we cannot just do everything in the D
compiler.
See these wiki pages about the ldc-build-runtime tool that comes
with ldc and Android cross-compilation, which uses the C
cross-compiler and linker from the Android NDK, for examples of
what I'm talking about:
https://wiki.dlang.org/Building_LDC_runtime_libraries
https://wiki.dlang.org/Build_D_for_Android
And given how many embedded toolchains are out there, I doubt we
can ever cover many of them beforehand. We could probably put
out a tutorial for some popular toolchain, but first we need to
get it completely working, which AFAIK is still being worked on.
If you'd like to chip in with that, as Rikki says, please talk to
the ldc devs or Mike and Radu.
