On Saturday, 23 July 2016 at 17:00:45 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
On 23 July 2016 at 16:24, Matthias Klumpp via
Digitalmars-d-announce <[email protected]>
wrote:
3) Making LDC available for more architectures, or making GDC
support a
higher version of the Phobos standard library and build shared
libraries.
At time, LDC is the better fit because of shared library
support and higher
Phobos version. Current D projects are hard to compile with
GDC because of
the latter reason.
More architectures are not per-se essential, but would be
awesome to have.
This feature request summarizes the status of arch support for
D in free
compilers: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1636
Well, as GDC is supporting the last C++ release, the only next
logical step would be to get bootstrapping from 2.068 to 2.071
or whatever version of the frontend has sufficiently ironed out
all compatibility regressions.
I would love to use GDC for Debian, but a compiler is really
useless if it doesn't compile 90% of the interesting D projects
out there...
LDC however, can do that.
This means that backporting compiler fixes and the standard
library from upstream is acceptably on the cards. It's just
that the feature-set will remain the same as 2.068.
API/ABI breaks in Phobos are really, really annoying - but GDC
having an ancient Phobos version is even more annoying, since
this basically ties us to using LDC.
GDC doesn't compile the majority of D projects ot there, and for
my own I need to explicitly add support for it, e.g. by
backporting standard library bits and shipping them with the
source code.
5) Have hardening supported for the D compilers:
https://wiki.debian.org/HardeningWalkthrough
As per the wiki, if you use GDC then there's nothing for you to
do.
Since the normal toolchain of Linux distributions is GCC based
and GCC has a pretty good backend with all the features we need,
using GDC would be a good choice.
But LDCs shared-library support is a pretty big deal for distros,
and together with the fact that GDC doesn't compile most of the
interesting new projects, LDC is the way to go.
Furthermore, since GDC is out-of-tree, some distributions like
Fedora don't have it / can't easily add it.
I would love to see this resolved - is this a manpower problem?
Or are there other blockers?
