Am Tue, 18 Oct 2016 16:02:28 -0700 schrieb Ali Çehreli <acehr...@yahoo.com>:
> I have a friend who has started writing a library in D. > > Although I recommended that he should use a recent dmd or ldc, he thinks > gdc is a better candidate because it's "available to the masses" through > Linux distros similar to how gcc is. Although he has a good point, the > gdc that came with his distro does not even support @nogc. > > Thoughts? Can you please tell him to change his mind! :p > > Ali If he is starting right *now*, missing fixes or language enhancements will cause confusion when he asks questions on the newsgroup or on IRC. (But he has you for that, right?) Back in the days I would have opted for GDC, too. It didn't lag far behind and I had hopes that it would get merged into GCC for good, meaning it would become the de facto D compiler on GNU systems. Nowadays I also see the large version gap and that it still hasn't been merged into mainline GCC. On the other hand LDC subjectively offers a couple more D specific enhancements, like turning GC allocations into stack allocations in trivial cases or the long list of compiler flags. Also with the backend being a library it is more flexible in the context of updating the front-end independently from the backend, which fits Dlang's development cycle better IMO. I'd say start with DMD, as it comes practically free of dependencies and is the fastest compiler, which may be the most useful aspect when you start to learn the language and need to iterate often. -- Marco
