Freestanding/Baremetal

[Immortalin]

Hi, since terra supports pointer arithmetic, can it be compiled freestanding? I am curious if it can be used for OS development .

[0joshuaolson1]

Maybe try the mailing list? Cross-compilation should be possible, and the Lua(JIT) and LLVM runtime dependencies are optional.

[zdevito]

The terralib.saveobj function should do what you want. See http://terralang.org/api.html#saving-terra-code for the details. It allows you to save Terra code as freestanding C ABI compatible code in various formats(.so, .o, llvm bitcode, etc.)

On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 8:51 PM, Joshua Olson notifications@github.com wrote:

Maybe try the mailing list? Cross-compilation should be possible, and the Lua(JIT) and LLVM runtime dependencies are optional.

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/zdevito/terra/issues/187#issuecomment-232853826, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAWmGi6pPipTgKl_LYV14DZ2jZy_qVorks5qVwO-gaJpZM4JD4xj .

[Immortalin]

@zdevito thanks, I will try it out

[Immortalin]

@zdevito I tried the following code but encounter some errors:

local intel_x86_target = terralib.newtarget {
  Triple = "i686-pc-none-elf";
  -- CPU = ;
  -- Features = "-ffreestanding ";
  Ffreestanding = true;
}

terralib.saveobj("hello", {target = intel_x86_target})

Errors:

src/terralib.lua:4296: expected terra globals or functions but found table
stack traceback:
    [C]: in function 'error'
    src/terralib.lua:4296: in function 'saveobj'
    .../Development/Lua/hello.terra:8: in main chunk

Also, can you pass arbitrary flags to the llvm from the terralib.newtarget() function?

[xspager]

I'm doing an experiment with Terra code running of the (U)EFI environment and this works if I link with C and the GNU-EFI lib so, this works:

terralib.includepath = terralib.includepath..";/usr/include/efi;/usr/include/efi/x86_64" 

local C = terralib.includecstring [[
    #include <efi.h>
    #include <efilib.h>
]]

terra terra_main(str: &uint16)
    C.Print(str)
end

terralib.saveobj('foo.o', {
    terra_main=terra_main,
    terra_add=add
}, {"-c", "-fno-stack-protector", "-fpic", "-fshort-wchar", "-mno-red-zone"})`

https://github.com/xspager/hello_efi_from_terra/blob/master/foo.t#L19

I'm looking into rewriting all code in Terra and doing something useful.

[xspager]

@Immortalin, try:

local intel_x86_target = terralib.newtarget {
  Triple = "i686-pc-none-elf";
  -- CPU = ;
  -- Features = "-ffreestanding ";
  Ffreestanding = true;
}

terralib.saveobj("hello", "", {}, {}, intel_x86_target)

You (may) need to pass the target to includecstring and includec, check: http://terralang.org/api.html#c-backwards-compatibility

[elliottslaughter]

@xspager Are you still interested in this? If so you could try again on master? I'm trying to figure out which of the older issues are still relevant.