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

[Thomas Schatzl]

 Hi,

 On Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:30:42 +0100, Jonas Maebe wrote:
> 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. [...]

 ... and has the hardware.

>
> 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).

 Nevertheless, there will be a 2.4.4 release for ARM/linux (barring any 
 last-minute showstoppers) ARMv5/EABI/softfloat, an rc1 is already on the 
 ftp. There will be an ARM/iOS crosscompiler release too.

 There are daily tests run for ARM/linux for both stable and trunk (see 
 http://www.freepascal.org/testsuite/cgi-bin/testsuite.cgi?os=15&cpu=6&version=0&date=).
 At least for 2.5.1 the number of failures has been in the "okay"-range 
 for some time now.

> 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.

 Ack.

 Thomas