Android & iOS Support

[crudbug]

Is there any plans to support these platforms. ?

[zdevito]

I don't have anything currently planned, but I'd be willing to help someone who wanted to attempt doing it. Currently there are some issues with a straight port of Terra/Lua because iOS disallows JIT compilation, which Terra relies on.

[ArnCarveris]

@zdevito Mostly in development environment we use desktop for iOS deployment AOT is allowed, also there need try link libs done by saveobj if it possible.

[elliottslaughter]

@crudbug Are you still interested in this?

Support for these platforms would be nice, currently I use C with LuaJIT precisely because it's more portable than Terra.

[elliottslaughter]

@MoorayJenkins I'm not sure what you mean. The main limiter with respect to portability for Terra is LuaJIT itself. In most cases LLVM has much broader platform support (with a couple of notable exceptions, like passing and returning arrays on the stack). E.g. we used Terra on a PPC64le machine recently, and the main "hiccup" was that LuaJIT doesn't support the platform, so we had to use #320 with PUC Lua. But that was mainly because we were forced to run the Terra compiler on the machine itself; if we were cross-compiling (which Terra already supports) we wouldn't have needed to do even that.

I don't know about e.g. binding to the Android or iOS APIs, but as far as generating .o files to link into larger applications, it should be pretty seamless. (Presumably since you're already using C, missing the JIT capability isn't a big deal for you, and you're already doing cross-compilation if you're targeting these devices.)

@elliottslaughter I overlooked the cross compilation capability of Terra.

Has anyone actually attempted to see how portable a simple application can be made and what hassle is involved? Since the "build" system is somewhat unique. ie: some application running on x86-64 linux cross compiled to run on windows, android and ios. What's the hassle involved?

[elliottslaughter]

If you're just compiling pure functions that are going to do math or whatever, it should be sufficient to just use the target feature of terralib.saveobj to spit out a .o that you can link however you want: http://terralang.org/api.html#targets

If you want to use platform APIs, then you'll need a full cross-compiling toolchain, which Terra doesn't supply. There might be some gotchas in terms of finding header files; you can add paths with INCLUDE_PATH but I'm not sure you take paths away, so it might be a little error-prone in that if you accidentally find a system header on the host you could miscompile.

I'm not sure how well these code paths have been exercised, so you might encounter some bitrot, but in theory the basic building blocks are in place to enable this sort of use case.