The new Slackware ARM AIO installed nicely on my RPi4 (thanks Stuart!)

I'd like to develop my bare-metal OS, and port some ARM32 stuff across (to run under Slackware ARM64).

I'm really more of a bare-metal/assembly code guy, so I just wanted to check what the best way to install multiple toolchains is...

Do I just cp -r the various untar'd downloads from ARM to /usr ?

Basically, is there a standard, simple, sensible way to do this -- or do I need to consider all the files/paths individually and check for identicalness (given all are the same 12.2.1 version from ARM)?

The libraries obviously differ, but shouldn't the binaries (ie. gcc ar as ld gdb nm objcopy etc.) be identical? I mean, they all *run* on Slackware ARM64 -- they're just supposed to produce different output (which they can do using flags...)

E.g.

seem identical (ok, gcc-12.2.1 rather than 12.2.0), and are stored in the same place.

while

are nicely differentiated.

But

(lib -- not lib32)

Etc.

I'd describe myself as a hardware guy, and yes, I dis Assembler, VHDL, PLC programes, etc.

I started thinking like you, but then I realised there's no point. The difference is a bit big, and 32bit is passé. There isn't a class of programs which need 32bit. Increasingly, if 32bit is considered at all, it's Cortex A-7 only (rpi 2).

FTR, the late Fred Emmot perfected multilib with Slamd64-12.2, a 64bit slackware fork. There was only the one release, because the maintainer got sick, & died shortly enough after. He did, however pass the techniques on to Alien Bob, who maintains x86_64 Multilib. My need for multilib in x86 is because so much windows code is/was 32bit. Further some closed source stuff (flash, Adobe stuff, even google earth in the past) was stubbornly only available in 32bit for a good while.

In Multilib, Glibc & Gcc are special fresh packages. You have libs for everything else, and many environment variables have to be altered to use 32bit programs on your 64bit machine. There is a script to be run. Unless you have a specific use case, you really don't want to do this to yourself. You definitely don't want the work.

I seem to remember that the multilib stuff for x86 Slackware was a bit of a pain.

But there are some things (like Chez Scheme) which are only available for Arm32, if they're available for Arm at all. -- I don't think it has any Arm32 assembly code (unless it's inlined), but there's lots of C int / pointer casting etc.

Look every cpu acutally runs on machine code. That's numbers telling the cpu which instructyion to execute next. Assembler is simply mnemonics that make machine code usable by humans. That said, it's no longer wise to write code in Assembler for security reasons. It's used in small chunks only.

A quick visit to DDG tells me Chez Scheme is not available for Arm. Neither, for that matter, is a lot of stuff. But if you can get source code, you 'port' it. Just compile it on an Arm toolchain. If it pukes, patch the compile fault & carry on.