• Mike (12/12) Dec 02 2013 I'm trying to assess the current state of LDC for Windows.
• Kai Nacke (16/29) Dec 02 2013 Hi Mike!
• David Nadlinger (20/24) Dec 02 2013 I was referring only to compiling _for_ Windows in the talk, and
• Temtaime (1/1) Dec 04 2013 MSVC 2013 runtime has native support of 80 bit floats.
• Kai Nacke (14/15) Dec 04 2013 I haven't checked this but it does not solve the problem. The

"Mike" <none none.com> writes:

I'm trying to assess the current state of LDC for Windows.

I'm not actually interested in using LDC to compile programs 
targeting Windows (at least not at the moment), but rather LDC 
running on Windows, compiling for ARM Cortex-M (thumb) targets.  
My motivation is I'm considering using Visual D for my 
development, and that means using Windows.

David Nadlinger's talk at DConf 2013 stated that Windows support 
wasn't quite there, but I couldn't determine if he was referring 
to compiling for Windows, or running on Windows, or both.

Could someone please clarify?

Thanks,
Mike

"Kai Nacke" <kai redstar.de> writes:

Hi Mike!

LDC can be compiled with MSVC without problems. If you link again 
a LLVM with ARM backend, then there should be no problem using 
Visual-D and LDC.
But you should be aware of the broken EH handling 
(https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/489) and possible 
problems with floats 
(https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/259).

I use MSVC for most of LDC development so it is quite usable.

Another possible solution is to use mingw32. The binary from the 
release contains only the X86 backend but it is quite easy to 
link against a LLVM with ARM backend. I am unsure if the mingw32 
based LDC can be used with Visual-D.

Regards,
Kai

On Monday, 2 December 2013 at 08:03:03 UTC, Mike wrote:
 I'm trying to assess the current state of LDC for Windows.

 I'm not actually interested in using LDC to compile programs 
 targeting Windows (at least not at the moment), but rather LDC 
 running on Windows, compiling for ARM Cortex-M (thumb) targets.
  My motivation is I'm considering using Visual D for my 
 development, and that means using Windows.

 David Nadlinger's talk at DConf 2013 stated that Windows 
 support wasn't quite there, but I couldn't determine if he was 
 referring to compiling for Windows, or running on Windows, or 
 both.

 Could someone please clarify?

 Thanks,
 Mike

"David Nadlinger" <code klickverbot.at> writes:

On Monday, 2 December 2013 at 08:03:03 UTC, Mike wrote:
 David Nadlinger's talk at DConf 2013 stated that Windows 
 support wasn't quite there, but I couldn't determine if he was 
 referring to compiling for Windows, or running on Windows, or 
 both.

I was referring only to compiling _for_ Windows in the talk, and 
that situation has improved quite a bit since DConf. As far as 
MinGW/Win32 goes, the only thing really missing at this point is 
a CI slave and a bit of work to eliminate the remaining test 
suite failures.

As far as running LDC on Windows goes, I don't know of any 
remaining limitations. What bugged us for a while is the 
unavailability of 80 bit floating point operations in the 
Microsoft C runtime, but at least when building with MinGW, this 
should be solved by now. Maybe Kai can tell you more about the 
situation with MSVC builds.

With regards to cross-compiling for ARM, one thing we notably 
don't do yet is using the target floating point semantic for 
'real', etc. during compile-time function evaluation. Whether 
this is a problem or not is a subject of debate – for the time 
being, just keep in mind that the CTFE results might be 
calculated with a higher precision than during runtime on the 
target hardware.

David

"Temtaime" <temtaime gmail.com> writes:

MSVC 2013 runtime has native support of 80 bit floats.

"Kai Nacke" <kai redstar.de> writes:

Hi Temtaine!

On Wednesday, 4 December 2013 at 09:45:10 UTC, Temtaime wrote:
 MSVC 2013 runtime has native support of 80 bit floats.

I haven't checked this but it does not solve the problem. The 
floating point format of the host should not really be used for 
cross-compiling.

Mike wnat to develop on Windows and targets ARM Cortex. The real 
data type is therefore the standard 64bit IEEE type. But LDC will 
use the x86 80bit type because it runs on Windows.

Same is true with PPC/PPC64. This architecture have a 128bit 
"double double" type. But running LDC on Windows, it is not 
possible to produce PPC/PPC64 code with the "double double".

IMHO this really needs to be fixed.

Regards,
Kai