On 17 Mar 2011, at 10:14, michael wrote:
Is this a situation that is likely to change soon? With the
explosive growth
of the ARM processor in mobile and embedded devices it would seem
time that
it was a tier one architecture.
Tier one or not depends on someone who is willing to spend time on
maintaining, packaging and supporting it. With ARM this is
particularly time intensive because there are so many different ARM
platforms (little/big endian, ARMv4/v5/v6/v7, OABI vs EABI, softfp vs
AFP vs VFPv2/VFPv3, embedded/direct hardware vs Linux vs Android's
Linux variant). If you support one, people immediately expect that you
support all of them. Furthermore, unfortunately a lot of people who
start working with FPC on ARM actually have very little experience
with ARM and therefore often don't even know what variant they have or
need, or what the consequences are.
The main reason no new ARM releases have been packaged is because
packaging one mainly results in a lot of questions from people who
downloaded/installed it and then notice that the code simply crashes
(because it turns out they have an incompatible platform compared to
what the package was built for).
I think it's really a "full time spare time" job to officially support
ARM, even if you pick only a subset of all possible platforms.
Jonas
PS: for iOS, it is in fact sort of officially supported, although
there the problem is that Apple's tools and SDK evolve very quickly so
it is hard to keep up.
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