Paul Gevers wrote:
Freepascal compiles directly to assembler so getting it to run on a new CPU family means MAJOR porting work.[please cc me, I am not subscribed] Hi all, I have the intention to briefly try out if I can get fpc (the FreePascal Compiler) to run on arm64, allowing several build dependent packages to also build. (That is, when not somebody else is already busy with that).I don't know if fpc is capable of doing at all,
There is some attempt at an arm64 port upstream ( http://svn.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/trunk/compiler/aarch64/ ) but it doesn't look like it's been significantly touched in over a year and http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=25042 suggests it's not in a usable state.
I suspect that when this does arrive it will be too big/intrusive to easilly backport so I suspect we will have to wait for a new major upstream release after they get it working.
Sadly I think it's highly unlikely we will see an arm64 port of freepascal in time for jessie.
For kfreebsd it's easy enough to get the compiler to run (freepascal already has a freebsd port) but getting it to link against C libraries is harder. When freepascal links against C libraries it uses a peice of special startup code called "cprt0.o" to set things up. cprt0.o is built from cprt0.asI failed so far on kFreeBSD
Neither the linux version or the freebsd version of that file will result in a successful link with C libaries on kfreebsd. Someone with a deep understanding of x86 assembler and binary conventions needs to look at the code (probablly both the freebsd and linux variations of it) and write a version that will work on kfreebsd.