GDC/Cross Compiler/crosstool-NG

GDC > Cross Compiler

First things first

Read the crosstool-NG website

Have a look at http://www.crosstool-ng.org/ and see if crosstool-NG fits you needs (Architecture, C library, OS, ...).

Install crosstool-NG

Download crosstool-NG from http://www.crosstool-ng.org/ . Install as described on it's homepage.

Read the documentation

crosstool-NG includes some useful documentation in it's source tarball. Have a look at the "docs" directory.

Build a C cross compiler

Before even trying to build a D cross compiler, built a C cross compiler with the desired configuration. Creating cross compilers is difficult, so you should first get a simple C compiler working before trying to build D.

Obtaining GDC sources

Checkout GDC

First clone the git repository. We'll use the gdc-4.8 branch.

mkdir -p gdc/dev
git clone https://github.com/D-Programming-GDC/GDC.git gdc/dev
cd gdc/dev
git checkout gdc-4.8
cd ../

Get GCC sources

Grab GCC sources from a mirror. You will need the full gcc archives. Unpack the archives in the gdc dir. This creates something like gdc/gcc-4.8.2.

Patch GCC sources

cd gdc/dev
./update-gcc.sh ../gcc-4.8.2
cd ../

Configure crosstool-NG for D

We assume you already have a configuration for your target system which produces a working C compiler so you only need to add D support.

Make crosstool-NG use our patched sources

Start ct-ng menuconfig. Select Paths and misc options and make sure Try features marked as EXPERIMENTAL is set. Select C compiler in the main menu and set GCC version to Custom gcc. Then set Full path to custom gcc source to the full path of the gdc/gcc-4.8.2 directory.

Enable D language

Go to C compiler, select Other languages and type d

If this option doesn't appear in the C compiler menu, then you may need to edit part of your crosstool-NG configuration manually to adjust this. It can hide the option when creating a bare metal cross compiler. You will need to comment out the following lines in your cc.in file.

if ! BARE_METAL
endif # ! BARE_METAL

Supposing your configuration is in a directory named 'config', you can comment the lines out easily with the following sed command.

sed -e 's/^\(endif # ! BARE_METAL\|if ! BARE_METAL\)/# \1/' -i config/cc.in

Disabling druntime & phobos

If druntime & phobos do not yet compile for your target you can disable them:

Start ct-ng menuconfig, go to "C compiler" and add "--disable-libphobos" to "Core gcc extra config" and "gcc extra config".

Build it

ct-ng build

Running the test suite

The object directory in which you'll run make check is ".build/TARGET-TRIPLET/build/build-cc-final/" relative to the folder where you ran ct-ng build. An example would be .build/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/build/build-cc-final/.

Change to this directory then follow GDC/Test_Suite#Testing_Cross-compilers.