Hi all,

The biggest problem we are facing right now is arguably that there hasn't been a proper binary release of LDC for almost four months.

The reason for not making any progress on that front has mainly been that there are a couple of serious issues that occur only relatively rarely, but are hard to fix, such as: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/407

But while I am not really comfortable with doing a release while issues such as this are still unresolved, I think it is vital that we at least have binaries available for people who want to test/use LDC in its current state, featuring the 2.063 frontend and a couple of critical fixes for MinGW.

As #407 is the only potentially huge regression I'm aware of, (the -march/-mcpu issue has been sorted out) I propose to release an alpha version based off current Git master. If the remaining issues turn out to be not so much of a problem, we can release 0.12.0 (at least one beta as usual) shortly after that.

This would also make sense as 2.064 will probably come out fairly soon, and people will expect us to support shared libraries (which I know how to implement, but we really want the 2.064 druntime changes to avoid duplicating work).

What do you think? I'll start work on getting alpha packages out, but wait for other opinions before I officially put them up.

Cheers,
David

Am 06.10.2013 21:42, schrieb David Nadlinger:
> Hi all,
>
> The biggest problem we are facing right now is arguably that there
> hasn't been a proper binary release of LDC for almost four months.
>
> The reason for not making any progress on that front has mainly been
> that there are a couple of serious issues that occur only relatively
> rarely, but are hard to fix, such as:
> https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/407
>
> But while I am not really comfortable with doing a release while
> issues such as this are still unresolved, I think it is vital that we
> at least have binaries available for people who want to test/use LDC
> in its current state, featuring the 2.063 frontend and a couple of
> critical fixes for MinGW.
>
> As #407 is the only potentially huge regression I'm aware of, (the
> -march/-mcpu issue has been sorted out) I propose to release an alpha
> version based off current Git master. If the remaining issues turn out
> to be not so much of a problem, we can release 0.12.0 (at least one
> beta as usual) shortly after that.
>
> This would also make sense as 2.064 will probably come out fairly
> soon, and people will expect us to support shared libraries (which I
> know how to implement, but we really want the 2.064 druntime changes
> to avoid duplicating work).
>
> What do you think? I'll start work on getting alpha packages out, but
> wait for other opinions before I officially put them up.
>
> Cheers,
> David
>

A binary release would be great. I would also greatly appreciate a new windows x64 build even in a unstable form. Issue 407 doesn't look that critical to me, because if you really need associative arrays you wrote your own by now considering how many issues there are with the druntime implementation of AAs.

Has there been any further progress on windows x64 exception handling?

Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Benjamin Thaut <code@benjamin-thaut.de> wrote:
> A binary release would be great. I would also greatly appreciate a new windows x64 build even in a unstable form. Issue 407 doesn't look that critical to me, because if you really need associative arrays you wrote your own by now considering how many issues there are with the druntime implementation of AAs.

@Kai: IIRC you had a script for making MSVC-based binary packages somewhere?

> Has there been any further progress on windows x64 exception handling?

Defines on what you mean by "further": https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/166

David

I made an LDC binary using MSVC. It works successfully and can compile druntime, phobos and others. The most problem is that MSVC runtime doesn't have DWARF exceptions, i removed it and when exception is occur the program crashes.

It will be great if someone remove dwarf at all.

Also i hope that i can port LDC to DMD's frontend from GIT HEAD.

On Sunday, 6 October 2013 at 19:42:24 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
> What do you think? I'll start work on getting alpha packages out, but
> wait for other opinions before I officially put them up.

If we can't fix the hard issues right now then we should do a release. Better a release with documented bugs then no release at all.

Kai

On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 07:07:12 UTC, Benjamin Thaut wrote:
> Has there been any further progress on windows x64 exception handling?

Hi Benjamin!

There is some progress but not too much. My LLVM patch for EH handling had 5 parts and of these 5 parts only 3 passed the review and I could commit them. For the remaining 2 parts:

- a convincing argument for the LLVM reviewers would be clang support
- there is a bug in the stack alignment code which leads to compile time failures
- dead epilogue code is still removed which leads to runtime crashes

On LDC side exception chaining is not implemented (but this is not a major issue compared with the other topics).

I am still working on these topics - I currently try to fix the stack alignment issue.

Kai

On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 15:14:28 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
> @Kai: IIRC you had a script for making MSVC-based binary packages somewhere?

Sorry, no. I played with the "Advanced Installer" but there is still more work needed.

Kai

Am 08.10.2013 07:21, schrieb Kai Nacke:
> On Monday, 7 October 2013 at 07:07:12 UTC, Benjamin Thaut wrote:
>> Has there been any further progress on windows x64 exception handling?
>
> Hi Benjamin!
>
> There is some progress but not too much. My LLVM patch for EH handling
> had 5 parts and of these 5 parts only 3 passed the review and I could
> commit them. For the remaining 2 parts:
>
> - a convincing argument for the LLVM reviewers would be clang support
> - there is a bug in the stack alignment code which leads to compile time
> failures
> - dead epilogue code is still removed which leads to runtime crashes
>
> On LDC side exception chaining is not implemented (but this is not a
> major issue compared with the other topics).
>
> I am still working on these topics - I currently try to fix the stack
> alignment issue.
>
> Kai

Hi,

thank you very much for the update and all your work. I still hope that LDC will become my compiler of choice for Windows x64. Currently dmd is the only viable option for this plattform because the last working GDC release still uses the 2.060 frontend.