July 24, 2016
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 <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> 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?
July 29, 2016
On Saturday, 23 July 2016 at 14:24:08 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> 4) Resolving weird LDC bugs like this one: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1618 - might actually be an LLVM issue, but I don't know enough to pin down the issue.

Turns out that this is not actually a LDC/LLVM bug, but an artefact of Ubuntu 16.10 patching GCC to generate position-independent executables by default.

Is DMD also affected by this? Does anybody know how other languages are dealing with the change?

 — David
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