"Andrew Wiley" <wiley.andre...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:mailman.1177.1308888314.14074.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... > So it seems that ARM is going to be getting quite a bit bigger in the > future, between the rise of smarter phones and Windows 8 support, and in > general D just doesn't exist on ARM. > GDC kind of works, but I've been unable to come up with a simple test case > for a bug with the section-anchors optimization, and fibers simply don't > work (although that may be due to some bad alignment in the D versions of > some C data structures that I haven't looked too far into yet). > > Aside from that, D is pretty much x86 specific. LDC builds on ARM but > segfaults when trying to build DRuntime, and DMD only supports x86 > codegen. > All assembly in DRuntime is x86 specific. > > I realize I'm a lurker around here, and while I've tried to get GDC > working > a bit better on ARM, I've been mostly unsuccessful, but should we, as a > community, be making some sort of commitment to make this better? I'm not > trying to be imposing (well, I am to some extent, but I realize I have no > right to), but this seems like it will probably get much more important in > the next few years. >
Actually, I strongly agree with you. The idea of being able to use something better than C/C++ on ARM-level embedded devices is one of the major things that drew me to D in the first place, getting close to ten years ago now (I was doing some GBA homebrew at the time, and had to use C - it got the job done, but it was an anachronistic language even back then). It's kind of frustrating that we're still not really there yet (although I admit it's been years since I've really had a chance to do anything outside the desktop/server). And it's not just getting the basics working, but also being able to easily handle embedded-oriented concerns like being able to ban GC allocs at compiletime (GC would be inappropriate on something like the GBA/DS, for instance). I've always been *far* more interested in ARM/embedded issues than the x64/multicore/concurrency issues that have been getting most of the focus. So that's been frustrating for me to watch. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much I would personally be able to contribute to the cause :/ I know next-to-nothing about compiler backends, druntime, LLVM or GCC, and my ARM experience was years ago and was C-only without really delving into the asm (neither arm nor thumb).