[Caml-list] Re: New experimental ARM backend [was: OCaml maintenance status / community fork (again)]

[Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com>]

On Dec 18, 2011, at 12:57 , Benedikt Meurer wrote:

> 
> On Dec 13, 2011, at 21:39 , Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> 
>> - Support for both softfp and VFPv3-D16 (if present).
>> - Properly supports interworking with Thumb/Thumb-2 code (for both OCaml and C code!)
>> - Supports dynamic linking and large memory models.
>> - Optional support for position-independent code via -fPIC, disabled by default and not required for natdynlink.
>> - Can emit both ARM and Thumb-2 code (currently Thumb-2 is used for ARMv7+ and ARM is used for everything else), with avg. code size savings of 27% for Thumb-2 (quite close the optimal 30% advertised by ARM Ltd.). I may also add support to emit small functions using Thumb-1 (for pre-ARMv7 / armel) in the future to reduce code size.
>> - Supports both AAPCS (armel) as well as extended VFP calling conventions (armhf).
>> - Properly supports backtraces.
>> - Recognizes several special ARM instructions (=> reduced code size and latency).
>> - Does not rely on GCC internals, but uses the standard ARM EABI runtime.
> 
> - Support for both VFPv3-D16 and VFPv3(-D32), using ocamlopt switch -ffpu (armhf only).
> - Support for architecture selection using -farch.
> - Support for profiling using gprof.
> - Code cleanups.
> - Confirmed to work with Debian/armel on ARM9 / Cortex-A8 and Debian/armhf on Cortex-A8.

Reported as PR#5433 at http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5433.

Benedikt