[fpc-devel] How to get FPC to generate floating point instructions for ARM?

[Jonas Maebe]

On 17 Mar 2011, at 10:14, michael wrote:

> Is this a situation that is likely to change soon? With the  
> explosive growth
> of the ARM processor in mobile and embedded devices it would seem  
> time that
> it was a tier one architecture.

Tier one or not depends on someone who is willing to spend time on  
maintaining, packaging and supporting it. With ARM this is  
particularly time intensive because there are so many different ARM  
platforms (little/big endian, ARMv4/v5/v6/v7, OABI vs EABI, softfp vs  
AFP vs VFPv2/VFPv3, embedded/direct hardware vs Linux vs Android's  
Linux variant). If you support one, people immediately expect that you  
support all of them. Furthermore, unfortunately a lot of people who  
start working with FPC on ARM actually have very little experience  
with ARM and therefore often don't even know what variant they have or  
need, or what the consequences are.

The main reason no new ARM releases have been packaged is because  
packaging one mainly results in a lot of questions from people who  
downloaded/installed it and then notice that the code simply crashes  
(because it turns out they have an incompatible platform compared to  
what the package was built for).

I think it's really a "full time spare time" job to officially support  
ARM, even if you pick only a subset of all possible platforms.


Jonas

PS: for iOS, it is in fact sort of officially supported, although  
there the problem is that Apple's tools and SDK evolve very quickly so  
it is hard to keep up.