Re: [Caml-list] arm backend

[Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>]

Joel Reymont wrote:

> Is the ARM backend (ocamlopt) usable and actively maintained?

In brief: yes modulo ABI issues; yes.

In more details:

In OCaml 3.11 and earlier, the ARM port uses an old ABI (software
conventions on using registers, etc).  This ABI corresponds to the
"arm" port of Debian; I don't know about other Linux distros.
OCaml/ARM works like a charm on platforms supported by Debian/arm.
I use it on a Linksys NSLU2.

However, most embedded Linux/ARM platforms use a more recent,
incompatible ABI called EABI.  In Debian Lenny, it's available under
the name "armel".

I recently revised the OCaml/ARM port to adapt it to EABI and to
software floating-point emulation.  You can find it in the CVS trunk,
and testing and feedback is most welcome.  It works fine under Debian
Lenny "armel".

Floating-point performance is better than with the old port, because
the latter used floating-point instructions that are no longer
available on contemporary ARM processors and therefore had to be
trapped and emulated by the kernel.  In contrast, with soft
floating-point, emulation is performed in user land by C library
functions, which can also take advantage of vector float
instructions if the processor supports them.

Concerning the iPhone, it is not supported out of the box by 3.11 nor
by the CVS trunk code.  For 3.11, several patches have been mentioned
on this list; it would be great if someone with iPhone development
experience could combine them and publish a unified patch.

For the CVS trunk code, it seems we are getting close: as far as I
could see, MacOSX/ARM uses EABI plus Apple's "signature" approach to
dynamic linking.  However, I haven't yet succeeded in running Apple's
iPhone SDK compilers from the command-line.  (It looks like one of
those Microsoft SDK's that assume everyone is developing from the
vendor-supplied IDE...)  Again, I welcome feedback and patches from
iPhone development experts.

- Xavier Leroy