[maemo-developers] Pascal on armel Was: [Re: About the upcoming maemo user karma]

[From: Igor Stoppa]

Hi,
On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 17:47 +0100, ext Luca Olivetti wrote:
> En/na Igor Stoppa ha escrit:
> 
> > Currently i'm stuck with having source code for Delphi/FreePascal and
> > not being able to compile it since (to the best of my knowledge)
> > FreePascal only supports ABI, not EABI.
> 
> Yes, that's the problem. OTOH, if it's a relatively simple console 
> program, with no external libraries dependencies, the static binary it 
> generates should run on the tablet (at least a simple hello world 
> worked, as well as a static C program compiled with an old ABI toolchain).
> I hope one day freepascal for arm will be able to generate eabi calls, 
> but I don't think that's one of freepascal developers top priorities :-(
> And something like KOL-CE (but for maemo) would be very interesting:
> http://wiki.freepascal.org/KOL-CE

thanks for the answer (also to Riku and peter and klaus here that provided
live verbal feedback).

I got it working this morning and being a compiler, it doesn't interact much with
 the system, apart from some file I/O.

As a reference for others with similar issues, here's the WORKSFORME procedure:
- install qemu
- create a barebone debian arm image following the instructions from [1]
- download the tarball from the emulated arm system the free pascal from [2],
  by using any of the available mirrors _but_ sourceforge (it doesn't have the 
  arm version)
- untar and install as root with the shell script 
  no debian package available :-(


Then i proceded by installing "make" (it was missing from the basic installation)
and finally managed to compile the NBC compiler for Lego NXT by following its
instructions.

Later I'll make the binary available on garage.
It seems to work on n810 and there is no difference between bytecode generated with the x86
version of nbc and the ARM one. 

[1]  http://www.aurel32.net/info/debian_arm_qemu.php
[2]  http://www.freepascal.org/down/arm/linux.var
-- 
Cheers, Igor

Igor Stoppa <igor.stoppa at nokia.com>
(Nokia Multimedia - CP - OSSO / Helsinki, Finland)