[swift-dev] Proof-of-concept port of Swift for Android

[Zhuowei Z]

Hello,
I'm currently working on adding support to the Swift compiler to allow it to target Android. Currently I've managed to get the stdlib to compile after hacking around/disabling a bunch of stuff (the custom linker script, the dl_iterate_phdr stuff, and the posix_spawn support), and managed to compile and run the simplest proof-of-concept  (import Glibc; exit(42)).
My fork is located at https://github.com/SwiftAndroid/swift and I would really appreciate any comments and suggestions.
In particular, I would like some help on the following issues:
- The current build system assumes that the host and the target has the same version of libicu. Android doesn't ship with libicu, so I had to point the build script to a copy of libicu manually. However, the same ICU include path is used to compile all target stdlibs,including the host one, so I had to make sure that my libicu headers matches the host one. Is there a way for me to specify in the build system to use a different libicu for one of the targets?
- The current stdlib build system also assumes that the host and the target are of the same OS family, so currently only Linux hosts can target Android. Is there anything I can do to allow Mac hosts to also target Android?
- What's the role of the special linker script, and what's the purpose of the conformance tables in shared libraries? I've commented the conformance table loading code out on Android; is that why 'print("Hello world")' prints out "String(" infinity?
- How should Swift integrate with the Android NDK?
- The version of Clang shipped with Ubuntu 15.10 can't seem to find the arm-linux-androideabi-ld linker even though I've pointed it to the Android NDK's copy via -gcc-toolchain. It only seems to check /usr/bin/armv7-none-linux-androideabi-ld before falling back to /usr/bin/ld. The Clang from the Android NDK can find the NDK ld fine. Is there a particular command line option I need to pass into the Ubuntu clang to make it look for the arm-linux-androideabi-ld in the gcc-toolchain folder?
Thank you for your help and for your work on Swift.
Zhuowei Zhang 		 	   		  
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