[fpc-devel] ARMHF a separate CPU? Why?

[Vsevolod Alekseyev]

It's your compiler; take it in any direction you want. I'm just surprised
that Peter Green's first thought when I say "ARM" is "Raspberry".

As for those FP-ABI thunks of mine, I've only learned that ARMHF is an
option, like, a few days ago, from this very maillist. There are all kinds
of goodies in the FPC trunk, but it takes a nontrivial effort to find out
about them.



-----Original Message-----
From: fpc-devel-bounces at lists.freepascal.org
[mailto:fpc-devel-bounces at lists.freepascal.org] On Behalf Of Jonas Maebe
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 1:24 PM
To: FPC developers' list
Subject: Re: [fpc-devel] ARMHF a separate CPU? Why?


On 09 Mar 2014, at 18:09, Vsevolod Alekseyev wrote:

> I guess Free Pascal doesn't care for the same platforms that I do :) 
> And that would be the mobile ones - iOS, Android, Windows Phone, bada. 
> Windows Mobile is kind of comatose now, but still. Within this set, 
> there's quite a zoo of ABIs; almost none of those have a *single* ARM ABI.

At least iOS has a single ARM ABI (except on ARM64, but that's a completely
different architecture in spite of the "ARM" name). And generating thunks
all over the place would definitely not be my definition of "properly
supporting" anything; especially on mobile platforms, where efficiency is
key.

> Do I need to
> spell out that the mobile scene is kind of a Big Deal these days, and 
> that the installed base of Android alone dwarfs that of Raspberry Pi 
> by orders of magnitude?

You're barking up the wrong tree. Platforms are only as well supported as
there are people who care about it and invest time in it. Saying that
someone else should invest time in a platform because of X (where X is "it
has a large market share", "it will be the next big thing", "it will gain
you a lot of new users", etc), is useless. In fact, it's usually niche
platforms that get the most attention because there you often have people
that really care about the platform.


Jonas
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