Hi everyone!

On behalf of the LDC team I am proud to announce the LDC 0.16.0 alpha4 release!
It is based on the 2.067.1 front-end and LLVM 3.1-3.7 (OS X: no support for 3.3).

Big thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the last alpha version! Without your feedback it would not be possible to eliminate the bugs so fast!

This alpha version fixes some issues and adds new features. The LDC team already considers this the best LDC release of all times!
Most important changes are:

- Frontend is now at 2.067.1
- LLVM 3.7 is supported
- DMD-style coverage analysis is added
- ABI changes which fixes a lot of bugs in the Win64 compiler

Be sure to read the change log at the GitHub release page which also has the package download links:
https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v0.16.0-alpha4

Note: This release has alpha quality. There are known and unknown bugs left. Please test it with your projects! There are 2 test failures on Linux/x86 but otherwise the release should be good.

Due to a library build problem with Phobos there is currently no MinGW32 version. !!!Volunteer help wanted!!!

MD5 checksums for the release packages:

3fd73c56485a930cf0ffa70878f899ed ldc-0.16.0-alpha4-src.tar.gz
d16ace7f1695b087f39db3049da8a439 ldc2-0.16.0-alpha4-linux-x86.tar.gz
efe021c1b8670588cc0a0fb4fe77bea6 ldc2-0.16.0-alpha4-linux-x86.tar.xz
315a16190d82448e5518ebe9099b0281 ldc2-0.16.0-alpha4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
a2f18d8d661dec07f85edcd2b75f947f ldc2-0.16.0-alpha4-linux-x86_64.tar.xz
b5c90c83f810562eda43d0b1cc7d94c2 ldc2-0.16.0-alpha4-osx-x86_64.tar.gz
48310e03f26978d9bb50586577e74ae4 ldc2-0.16.0-alpha4-osx-x86_64.tar.xz
f2996c43477d1ec620ae1dc41742745a ldc2-0.16.0-alpha4-win64-msvc.zip

Regarding the binaries:
The Linux binaries are built on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with gcc 4.8.x and LLVM 3.6.2. They work on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (or later) without installing additional software.

The OS X binaries are now built on OS X 10.10. It is currently unknown if this causes backwards compatibility issues.

The Win64 MSVC version is still considered alpha quality. It is built with VS2015 using LLVM 3.7 in release mode. The distribution now contains a precompiled libcurl 7.40.0 from http://d.darktech.org/libcurl.html. For any other VisualStudio version you need to rebuild the library.
You find the build script here: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc-scripts/blob/master/ldc2-win64/RELEASE.proj

Please be sure to report any bugs at https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues, and feel free to drop by at the digitalmars.D.ldc forums (http://forum.dlang.org/group/digitalmars.D.ldc) for any questions or comments.

Thanks to everybody involved in making this happen!

Regards,
Kai

Haven't checked any real projects but on packaging side all is good (with LLVM 3.6)

Is -cov implementation shared with DMD or different?

On Saturday, 19 September 2015 at 21:08:47 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
> Hi everyone!
>
> On behalf of the LDC team I am proud to announce the LDC 0.16.0 alpha4 release!


Still getting the same segfault that I was experiencing in the last announce thread

http://forum.dlang.org/post/fcnljqdpkdgieecahkxg@forum.dlang.org

On Sunday, 20 September 2015 at 00:14:11 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> On Saturday, 19 September 2015 at 21:08:47 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
>> Hi everyone!
>>
>> On behalf of the LDC team I am proud to announce the LDC 0.16.0 alpha4 release!
>
>
> Still getting the same segfault that I was experiencing in the last announce thread
>
> http://forum.dlang.org/post/fcnljqdpkdgieecahkxg@forum.dlang.org

How to reproduce? I can't find the project on code.dlang.org.

Regards,
Kai

On 2015-09-19 23:08, Kai Nacke wrote:

> The OS X binaries are now built on OS X 10.10. It is currently unknown
> if this causes backwards compatibility issues.

If you link with "-macosx_version_min 10.<x>", where <x> is some number, you can choose which version of the OS to be compatible with.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Sunday, 20 September 2015 at 00:56:36 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
>> http://forum.dlang.org/post/fcnljqdpkdgieecahkxg@forum.dlang.org
>
> How to reproduce? I can't find the project on code.dlang.org.
>
> Regards,
> Kai

Sorry, I should have mentioned it's a private side project on github. I'll give you access to the repo so you can download it.

On Sunday, 20 September 2015 at 14:42:32 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> On Sunday, 20 September 2015 at 00:56:36 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
>>> http://forum.dlang.org/post/fcnljqdpkdgieecahkxg@forum.dlang.org
>>
>> How to reproduce? I can't find the project on code.dlang.org.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Kai
>
> Sorry, I should have mentioned it's a private side project on github. I'll give you access to the repo so you can download it.

Thanks for the access. The compiler dies deep in LLVM, after a call to DtoConstArrayInitializer(). I wonder if this is the same as issue #1022 (https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1022).

BTW: I did the following:

1) run: dub -v --compiler=ldc2 2>bug.sh
2) edit bug.sh: add #!/bin/bash -x add top, remove all lines except the ldc2. Add gdb --args before ldc2
3) chmod 755 bug.sh
4) run: ./bug.sh You are now in gdb. Type r and after the crash bt. This stacktrace is the interesting one.

Regards,
Kai

On Sunday, 20 September 2015 at 14:42:32 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> On Sunday, 20 September 2015 at 00:56:36 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
>>> http://forum.dlang.org/post/fcnljqdpkdgieecahkxg@forum.dlang.org
>>
>> How to reproduce? I can't find the project on code.dlang.org.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Kai
>
> Sorry, I should have mentioned it's a private side project on github. I'll give you access to the repo so you can download it.

Thanks for the access. I opened issue #1101 (https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1101) including a minimal test case.

Regards,
Kai

On Sunday, 20 September 2015 at 16:20:48 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
> Thanks for the access. I opened issue #1101 (https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1101) including a minimal test case.
>
> Regards,
> Kai

Thanks for fixing it so quickly! In the next alpha/beta I'll test again and see if that was the only issue.

On Saturday, 19 September 2015 at 21:08:47 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
> Hi everyone!
>
> On behalf of the LDC team I am proud to announce the LDC 0.16.0 alpha4 release!
>


Latest version of my game is built with this release:
http://www.gamesfrommars.fr/vibrant/

I was pleased to see performance enhancements notably in GC pauses.