On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Bernhard Rosenkranzer bernhard.rosenkranzer@linaro.org wrote:
Hi, while working on some improvements, I noticed that our Android toolchain binaries are built as 32-bit x86. Is there any reason for this (other than "we inherited it from AOSP")?
While it doesn't matter much, it doesn't make much sense to me - Android can't currently be built on 32-bit machines (so it's not about having one binary that will work for mostly everyone - but I suspect that's exactly where it started back in the times of Android 1.0), so why introduce dependencies on a 32-bit libc and slow things down slightly?
If nobody complains, I'll remove the "-m32" flag from the Android toolchain builds - let's see how much we can speed up the build process itself without putting any real work into it...
That's a good question. It was an explicit decision from the past as we said we don't want to deviate from AOSP best practices unless we have very good arguments.
Also our binary toolchain will probably become more useful for 32-bit once we start talking about shipping NDK/SDK. Then, having just one binary to verify could turn out to be a smart thing.
If you feel strongly this should be changed in future, let's discuss during this month so we can work eventual changes into our 11.09 plan preparations.