[swift-dev] Support for arm-linux cross-compilation

[Cody Krieger]

Excellent! I'll start poking at this ASAP—my team and I can't wait to have Swift on our embedded Linux box.

Thanks!
Cody

> On Dec 4, 2015, at 1:27 PM, Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2015 at 1:04 PM, Cody Krieger <cody at krieger.io> wrote:
>> Hi there,
>> 
>> I'm interested in getting Swift cross-compiling to arm(v7)-linux. (For my specific use case, I actually need to be able to cross-compile for arm-linux from a *Darwin* host. A little strange, I know.)
>> 
>> In digging through the build scripts and CMake listfiles, I discovered that cross-compilation is not supported in a way that is sufficiently generic to support my use case; it's all pretty special-cased around Darwin => iOS (or derivative) cross-compilation.
>> 
>> I can't imagine more than, like, three people want to do Darwin => arm-linux cross-compilation, so adding support for that specific combination upstream seems pretty useless—but if the build scripts supported cross-compilation in a fairly generic fashion, I imagine that's something that more people would be happy to see.
>> 
>> Given that it seems like a non-trivial amount of build script/CMake work is needed to support cross-compilation in a generic way, I'm curious if there is even a remote desire to see that land in the tree. If so, I'd be more than happy to spearhead or otherwise assist with that effort.
> 
> Hi Cody,
> 
> I think making our cross-compilation more general is a very good
> direction.  That will involve more complexity in the build scripts,
> true, but I think that is necessary complexity for a successful
> compiler project.
> 
> I don't think cross-compiling to arm-linux from OS X would be a rare
> thing in Swift community, if it was supported "out of the box".
> 
> However, build-script-impl as a shell script has surpassed a
> comfortable size a long time ago -- it is over 2K lines now.  If
> someone would take on porting it to a language that scales better for
> larger programs and is easily available on our targets (python?), it
> would be really awesome.
> 
> Dmitri
> 
> -- 
> main(i,j){for(i=2;;i++){for(j=2;j<i;j++){if(!(i%j)){j=0;break;}}if
> (j){printf("%d\n",i);}}} /*Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr at gmail.com>*/