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

[Jonas Maebe]

On 09 Mar 2014, at 18:47, Vsevolod Alekseyev wrote:

> It's your compiler; take it in any direction you want.

My point was exactly that it's /not/ me that decides the direction in which the compiler goes, and even less as to which platforms get more attention than others. If someone cares a lot about MSDOS and starts implementing a 8086 code generator and MSDOS support, than that gets added (which, incidentally, has been happening over the past year). It's the same with ARM platform support.

> I'm just surprised
> that Peter Green's first thought when I say "ARM" is "Raspberry".

It's probably because it's the platform that he cares about most.

> 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.

You're absolutely right that this needs to be fleshed out better. Most of the ARM platform support (not code generator, that's separate), except for iOS, has however been added via "drive-by patches" or just a bit of quick hacking until it worked for a single person, rather than by people want to commit themselves as "full time" maintainers of FPC for those platforms (including building/packaging releases for all relevant distributions/platforms, following up on all related bug reports etc). Combined with the mishmash that is ARM ABIs and sub-platforms, the situation is less than satisfactory at this time.


Jonas