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

[Jonas Maebe]

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