"Drop ARM and MIPS support"

[Páll Haraldsson]

I was looking into the situation of supporting MIPS..

I couldn't really care less (for now, for embedded mostly, not a priority for Julia), except I want full Android support.

How difficult would it be to support MIPS 32 and 64 bit? Is it just a question of nobody having tried it/cared? Strictly speaking ARMv8-A (64-bit, older ARMv6 not so much), needs to work also for Android.

Is this something that helps?:

http://llvm.org/releases/3.6.1/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#changes-to-the-mips-target

"Changes to the MIPS Target

Added support for 128-bit integers on 64-bit targets."

I stumbled on this, that was alarming (I wasn't even sure at first if I was looking at "Julia"/femptolisp.. but this gnu package was a false alarm, at least for ARM/MIPS/Android):

[PATCH] gnu: julia: Drop ARM and MIPS support.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-04/msg00128.html

Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2015 10:39:25 +0200

Subject: [PATCH 1/2] gnu: julia: Mark as unsupported on ARM and MIPS.

* gnu/packages/julia.scm (julia): Add 'supported-systems' field.

---

 gnu/packages/julia.scm | 3 +++

 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)

diff --git a/gnu/packages/julia.scm b/gnu/packages/julia.scm

index 844f1b2..efc867d 100644

--- a/gnu/packages/julia.scm

+++ b/gnu/packages/julia.scm

@@ -161,6 +161,9 @@

        ("pkg-config" ,pkg-config)

        ("python" ,python-2)

        ("which" ,which)))

+    ;; Julia is not officially released for ARM and MIPS.

+    ;; See https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/10639

[Patrick O'Leary]

That just looks like Guix release management stuff. ARM is still an area of active development, though several folks have made good progress on ARMv7. I may be the only person so far to try on ARMv8 hardware; I haven't made any progress since https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/10791 though.

[catc...@bromberger.com]

Just to add: we've gotten Julia built on ARMv7 (Raspberry Pi 2). Some tests fail, but the REPL works and it's useful though slow.

There's not a "one-step build" for it yet - you'll need to follow the instructions here for now.