Hi everyone!

On behalf of the LDC team I am proud to announce the new 0.17.0-beta2 release!
It is based on the 2.068.2 front-end and LLVM 3.5-3.8.

This second beta version of the new release got extensive testing. It is known to work several Linux architectures, Windows 64bit, FreeBSD and Solaris.
The compiler now supports NetBSD and has improved support for OpenBSD and DragonFly, too - though runtime support for these three BSD flavours is still missing.
We did many internal refactorings, including preparation for a Win32 compiler. Thanks to the whole team doing this great work.

A special thanks goes to Rainer for the work on the Win32 compiler. A PREVIEW version of this compiler is also made available.

LDC already supports the new LLVM 3.8 release which is scheduled for end of February.

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/v0.17.0-beta2

Please test this beta version to make it another great relase!

Due to an upload issue with GitHub there is no GZip-compressed archive for OS X.

MD5 checksums for the release packages:

db615a44d85203d8dfd0a3a9efccc70c ldc-0.17.0-beta2-src.tar.gz
ebb55d0c6abf0426a26cf5f7e1e50940 ldc2-0.17.0-beta2-linux-x86.tar.gz
7d709bb8d50d7a87138f90a462b56164 ldc2-0.17.0-beta2-linux-x86.tar.xz
c74b75b3cfcbf36da6613f81a814732b ldc2-0.17.0-beta2-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
91411927abb69f3137303c86b901d2e0 ldc2-0.17.0-beta2-linux-x86_64.tar.xz
dffad48555dba548c9f1e9f3222ae855 ldc2-0.17.0-beta2-osx-x86_64.tar.xz
9c008cce4fa1f77e4e2e85d4eeae931b ldc2-0.17.0-beta2-win32-msvc.zip
e6bdc562961e00912139b55f19694a87 ldc2-0.17.0-beta2-win64-msvc.zip

Regarding the binaries:
The Linux binaries are built on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with gcc 4.8.x and LLVM 3.7.1. They work on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (or later) without installing additional software.

The OS X binaries are built with LLVM 3.6.2 on OS X 10.10.

The Win64 MSVC version is built with VS2015 using LLVM 3.7.1 in release mode. The distribution now contains a precompiled libcurl 7.46.0 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

The Win32 MSVC version is built with VS2015 using LLVM 3.8.0rc1 in release mode. Please note that this is a PREVIEW version only.

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