[fpc-pascal] FPC for ARM

[Thomas Schatzl]

Hi,

On Mon, 2011-12-19 at 13:16 +0200, Juha Manninen wrote:
> 2011/11/28 Henry Vermaak <henry.vermaak at gmail.com>
>         There is an arm release for 2.6.0rc1, but it was built using
>         old binutils (last time I checked, at least):
>         
>         ftp://freepascal.stack.nl/pub/fpc/beta/2.6.0-rc1/arm-linux/
> 
> I finally got into installing and testing FPC in the ARM-gadget.
> Other people had replaced the original Debian with Ubuntu 9.something.
> I was able to copy and install your FPC 2.6.0-rc1 package there. It
> was easier than I thought!
> The compiler itself works but assembler is missing. See :
> ---
> root at ubuntu:/usr/share/doc/fpc-2.6.0/examples/text# fpc hello.pp 
> Free Pascal Compiler version 2.6.0rc1 [2011/10/20] for arm
> Copyright (c) 1993-2011 by Florian Klaempfl and others
> Target OS: Linux for ARMEL
> Compiling hello.pp
> Assembling hello
> hello.pp(19,27) Error: Assembler as not found, switching to external
> assembling
> hello.pp(19,27) Fatal: There were 1 errors compiling module, stopping
> ---
> 
> Does it mean an assembler is always needed with ARM? In my
> understanding x86 based PCs don't need a separate assembler with FPC.
> "apt-get install as" didn't install anything.

Afaik only the Windows platforms have an internal assembler and linker.
At least arm/ppc*-linux needs GNU binutils.

The solution is to install the "binutils" package on Debian systems.

The error reported by the original poster (H. Vermaak) seems to be
caused by some compiler internal error observed when running the
bootstrap compiler on that system, which may have various reasons.
(http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.free-pascal.general/25299)

"... What setup issue do you think can cause an *internal error* in 
the bootstrap compiler?" (emphasis mine)

Since you already reached the assembling/linking stage with the bootstrap compiler, you did not encounter it.

Thomas