Unable to Load Dart SDK on Raspberry Pi Zero W

Question

I'm trying to get the Dart SDK on a Pi Zero W.

When I download the SDK archive, extract it, and put it in the /usr/lib folder manually, I get segmentation faults when I try to run any of the command line tools. I reflashed the memory card (32GB, so plenty large) from scratch from an x64 machine and pre-loaded the SDK as well to help ensure that there wasn't any funky Pi file corruption and got the same result.

Though I was sure it wouldn't work, I loaded the ARM7 version of the SDK, and got executable file format incompatibility errors that were not surprising.

I downloaded the.deb package, and got a warning that the file was not meant for my Pi and that I might break things, so I didn't try to install it.

I used the apt-get instructions from the Dart website and that failed with the error "E: Unable to locate package dart" which seems to indicate that I had the incorrect name for the package (note: I copied and pasted it directly from the Dart website). I tried to look through the repository contents, and assuming that I looked at the correct file, there were not any Dart entries in it, so the error is not surprising.

My Linux competence is suspect, so I could use any ideas. I'd prefer not to build the SDK from scratch as, in my experience, open source build instructions almost always assume that the user needs to know/do something that is not explicitly listed in the instructions, so that tends to be a 2-hour effort that ultimately fails (pretty sure I'm not the only one who's had that experience).

Thoughts, anyone?

Answer 1

That is not going to work. Your problem is that "Pi Zero W" is a "1GHz single-core ARMv6 CPU (BCM2835)" CPU which means it can only execute programs for the ARMv6 architecture or lower.

Dart does have a minimum requirement for ARMv7 since they removed support for ARMv6 early this year: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/42069

The support was never that great for ARMv6 (I did have an old Raspberry Pi) and programs was running really slow with missing support for FFI. So my recommendation is to get a board which supports ARMv7 or ARMv8 (ARM64) which works really great.