Some essential background information for this post is "D" is an interesting and distinct computer language that is a re-engineered version of C++. Presumably because of all the programmer interest in "D", there are three well-known D compilers with free software licenses. They are
1. dmd (the fundamental D compiler from "Digital Mars" which effectively sets the D syntax standards); 2. ldc (a D compiler with dmd front-end [the part of the compiler that transforms D syntax to a language-independent intermediate representation] and LLVM back-end); and 3. gdc (the GNU-implemented D compiler which has its own unique front-end and gcc backend). My own Debian Buster platform gives me access to official ldc and gdc packages, and I have built a working dmd on that platform from the Digital Mars source code for that compiler. So I think with some work all developers here with access to Unix platforms and an interest in "D" should be able to gain access to all three compilers. The D compiler choice is more limited on Windows. For example, there are no official packages for ldc and gdc on Cygwin or MSYS2 so I suspect both compilers would need a lot of work before they worked on Windows. However, dmd is apparently available for all Windows platforms as a free download from Digital Mars so developers here who are limited to just Windows platforms can still try out our D binding and examples once I make dmd one of the compilers that are correctly supported for the PLplot needs by our CMake D language support logic. I started this development topic a few days ago in response to <https://sourceforge.net/p/plplot/patches/35/> where the poster's commentary indicated the installed D examples would not traditionally compile with dmd, and his substantial patch to the source code for the D examples fixed all such issues except for x16d (where his issue for that example may have been due to the differences between the gdc-built plplotdmd library that was presumably installed and the dmd-built examples). I have since been able to update our D examples (on a private topic branch which I plan to push in due course) with that patch and show that gdc D compiler was able to compile and run those updated examples without run-time or diff-report issues in our build tree. So that (examples that now work locally for me with gdc and externally for someone else with dmd) is a promising start to this topic, but to finish it I want to generalize our CMake D language support logic and overall logic so that the ldc and dmd D compilers work as well for me as the gdc compiler currently does for our 3 different D builds (the CMake-based build of our D binding and examples, the CMake-based build of our installed D examples that are linked to our installed D binding, and the traditional (Makefile + pkg-config) build of our installed D examples that are linked to our installed D binding). Our current CMake D language support (located in cmake/modules/language_support/cmake) was forked by Werner Smekal from the (now defunct) CMakeD project in 2009. My comprehensive tests show our fork does support gdc well on Linux (except for some known limitations such as being forced to use a static version of the plplotdmd library). Our fork does have dmd support which might have been tested by Werner in 2009, but I don't think anyone has tested it since with dmd. Our fork has no support for ldc. Our changes to the 2009 version of CMakeD have been fairly small but significant, but since then there have been other more substantial changes and forks of that project culminating with the cmake-d project at <https://github.com/dcarp/cmake-d> which continues to be actively developed. Note that project advertises that it supports all three of dmd, ldc, and gdc. That ldc support is just not available with our fork of CMakeD, and I think it is quite likely (modulo a few modest changes like the rpath one below) that cmake-d has better support for dmd than our fork. So I tried gdc with cmake-d language support (accessed externally), and I ran into an rpath issue which should easily be fixed (since our fork of CMakeD does handle rpath well) but which I temporarily worked around with LD_LIBRARY_PATH. They results of that experiment were perfect (no run-time or diff report issues with the updated D examples). So replacing our ancient fork of CMakeD with a modern fork of cmake-d currently looks like the proper way forward. However, before implementing that I need to do more comparisons between the two CMake D language support projects for dmd, and assuming I can get dmd to work correctly for our needs for cmake-d using modest changes to cmake-d, I also need to try out lcd (not available for our ancient fork of CMakeD) using cmake-d. More later. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
