I’ve been working on some groundwork features to sneak into Builder 3.28 so that we can build upon them for 3.30. In particular, I’ve started to land device abstractions. The goal around this is to make it easier to do cross-architecture development as well as support devices like phones, tablets, and IoT.

For every class and kind of device we want to support, some level of integration work will be required for a great experience. But a lot of it shares some common abstractions. Builder 3.28 will include some of that plumbing.

For example, we can detect various Qemu configurations and provide cross-architecture building for Flatpak. This isn’t using a cross-compiler, but rather a GCC compiled for aarch64 as part of the Flatpak SDK. This is much slower than a proper cross-compiler toolchain, but it does help prove some of our abstractions are working correctly (and that was the goal for this early stage).

Some of the big things we need to address as we head towards 3.30 include running the app on a remote device as well as hooking up gdb. I’d like to see Flatpak gain the support for providing a cross-compiler via an SDK extension too.

I’d like to gain support for simulators in 3.30 as well. My personal effort is going to be based around GNU-based systems. However, if others join in and want to provide support for other sorts of devices, I’d be happy to get the contributions.

Anyway, Builder 3.28 can do some interesting things if you know where to find them. So for 3.30 we’ll polish them up and make them useful to vastly more people.