[fpc-devel] Initial iPhone/iPod Touch port

[Jonas Maebe]

Hello,

I'm happy to announce that a couple of weeks back, I finally got my  
iPhone developer certificate so I could start testing the port. It  
turned out that
a) the version of Mac OS X on the iPhone really is virtually the same  
as the desktop version, so I did not have to change any existing RTL  
code at all (I only had to add support for ARM hardware exceptions --  
more on that below)
b) the ARM code generator in FPC is quite good, as I did not really  
have to fix anything there (and Darwin/ARM uses the OABI rather than  
the EABI, so no problems there either)
c) the Darwin/ARM support I added to the compiler earlier on, based on  
looking at GCC-generated code and the GCC and LLVM code generators,  
worked fine as well (that was a really unexpected but pleasant  
surprise -- and no, I didn't secretly test that on a jailbroken iPod  
or so, I wrote it before I even had my iPod :)

Today, I've converted FPC's glutdemo to OpenGL ES and successfully  
integrated that code into the Xcode "OpenGL ES Application" template  
(so all the setup is don't by Apple's Objective-C code, but the  
drawing/animation by FPC code). The result is that I now have an  
application on my iPod that displays a flying/swiveling/spinning FPC  
logo text built out of cubes (screenshot in attachment). Not  
particularly useful, but nice nonetheless :)


I'll now focus on trying to create a distribution which is generally  
usable, i.o.w., an installer package and one or more Xcode template  
projects that integrate FPC code (I'm currently doing most things  
manually, with Xcode doing the code signing, transferring to the iPod  
and attaching the debugger). Some remaining challenges/issues are:

1) Distribution

I cannot distribute the translation of one particular header file from  
the iPhone SDK that is necessary to compile the FPC run time library  
(for handling hardware exceptions). It can however be converted  
automatically from the C header. This means that I either have to  
figure out at installation time where you installed the iPhone SDK  
(anyone knows whether/how this is possible based on installation  
receipts or so?), or ask at installation time where it's installed and  
communicate this back to a script that then will translate the file  
and compile everything (again, ideas are welcome for how you can do  
this using Apple's installer -- you can launch apps pre/post  
installation, but I'm close to a zero as far as writing GUI apps goes  
and I have no idea how to safely communicate things back to the  
installation script).

2) Simulator support

While the code for the simulator itself is generic Mac OS X/Intel  
code, the APIs are sometimes slightly different (e.g., OpenGL ES on  
the iPhone/iPod vs. OpenGL on the desktop -- and OpenGL ES is not a  
proper subset of OpenGL). This means it has to become an separate FPC  
target as well (unless you want to manually avoid using the wrong  
units), which is annoying. I think I won't spend much if any time on  
this, certainly not initially.

3) Testing

While I did not encounter any code generator or other problems during  
my getting test programs to run, the ARM code generator is not as well  
tested as the PowerPC and i386 code generators. The problem is that  
you cannot login remotely on an iPhone/iPod Touch (unless it's  
jailbroken, but a) my iPod Touch 2G cannot yet be jailbroken, and b) I  
can't really afford getting into that since that could jeopardise the  
entire port), which means that there is no way to efficiently run our  
regression test suite on them at this time (you can maybe do it  
manually or scripted via Xcode, if you figure out a way to extract the  
exit code from the test programs, but even then it would be extremely  
slow).

Please note that creating a generally usable distribution with the  
appropriate Xcode templates itself is a significant amount of work,  
and that it may still take a couple of weeks before that gets finished.

But apart from that: it works :)


Jonas
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Screenshot 2009.01.03 15.20.35.png
Type: image/png
Size: 13816 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.freepascal.org/pipermail/fpc-devel/attachments/20090103/d8343fdb/attachment.png>
-------------- next part --------------