Freestanding i386 target

[Ruan-pysoft]

I was playing around today trying to do some basic kernel-level programming, initially following the Osdev Wiki's Bare Bones tutorial and then the plan was to get ps2 keyboard support up and hopefully I can make a nice demo program, similar to what I got up and running in C++, but in a language more suited to kernel development (and which I like more).

All was going well, however I found that there was no freestanding i386 target. There was i386 targets, like linux_i386, as well as freestanding targets for the 64-bit instruction set like freestanding_amd64_sysv, but no freestanding_i386. Since I did have the compiler source downloaded, I quickly went nosing around there, and in the end I added it myself very easily, with just eight added lines, pretty much just registering the target with the compiler.

And lo and behold, it works!

I'm a bit suspicious as to why it was such a simple change, so I'm not opening a pull request immediately; is there a reason why freestanding_i386 isn't already a supported target? Does each target perhaps need special attention and there's just nobody to look after it?

If there is no reason for it not being a supported target, I'd be happy to open a pull request to add it :) (though I'll have to go shuffle around the location of target_freestanding_i386 so that it matches with how everything else is laid out in source first)

[antisaling]

Also nosing in this discussion: nothing against having that target, the more use-cases the language can support the merrier. I just find that maintainers are kinda overwhelmed right now so don't expect this to be merged asap I guess? hopefully you're lucky though

[Ruan-pysoft]

Yeah, I mean I would volunteer to maintain it, but I'm a) not confident enough of my skills, b) not familiar enough with Odin's codebase, and c) starting the semester at uni (and this semester looks to be rough, so who knows how much time I'll have)

Worst comes to worse, I guess I'll just play around with my own fork of Odin that does nothing but add the target... Of course if I then run into bugs I'd be on my own, but so life goes.

[antisaling]

I don't think anyone is going to hold you against maintainership promises in this ol' land. but you do you. good luck at uni!

[antisaling]

#7171 (comment)

In general, unless it is easy to procure, we are vetoing adding targets until at least 1 core contributor has hardware for it AND is willing to support it.

I retract my assumption lol. it should be a doable target either way