Hi everyone!

The LDC team moves fast to a major milestone: we're aiming for a 1.0.0 release!

On behalf of the LDC team I am proud to announce the new 1.0.0-beta1 release!
It is based on the 2.070.2 front-end and supports LLVM 3.5-3.8.

We made great progress since the alpha1 version! The frontend level was raised to 2.070.2. (There will be no 2.069.2 based release.) On most supported platforms LDC can build itself.

There are many highlights in this release:
- Uncountable improvements to make LDC work on Windows, Linux/ARM, Android and iOS.
- The Windows exception handling stuff, now working on Win32 and Win64 versions.

A big thank to the LDC team for devoting so much passion. This is really getting a rocking release!

Please, try this beta1 release. Every feedback we get can only improve the 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/v1.0.0-beta1

MD5 checksums for the release packages:

ab6bbb5e3e9c61d84eabbf277fcbc16a ldc-1.0.0-beta1-src.tar.gz
188c62abb68346068bacfec223ae5e21 ldc2-1.0.0-beta1-linux-armv7hf.tar.xz
bb002c79f801fc51b34f0a09c82c7c09 ldc2-1.0.0-beta1-linux-x86.tar.xz
08ba62875263e8c5290601ee51bc4d58 ldc2-1.0.0-beta1-linux-x86_64.tar.xz
9c6b2f4d50189232e339e64b87d3c6a7 ldc2-1.0.0-beta1-osx-x86_64-LLVM3.8.0.tar.xz
0ca9a964e7e03ac28d400f9b9c106222 ldc2-1.0.0-beta1-win32-msvc.zip
4a53195db8d5aa7aa9032cccb573d9f9 ldc2-1.0.0-beta1-win64-msvc.zip

Regarding the binaries:
The Linux x86/x86_64 binaries are built on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with gcc 4.8.x, ldc2 1.0.0-beta1 and LLVM 3.7.1. They work on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (or later) without installing additional software.
The Linux armv7hf binary is built on Gentoo/ARM with gcc 4.9.x, ldc2 0.17.1 and LLVM 3.7.1.

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

The Win32 and Win64 MSVC versions are built with VS2015 (update 1) using ldc2 1.0.0-beta1 and LLVM trunk 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

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

On Monday, 25 April 2016 at 06:39:43 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
> Hi everyone!
>
> The LDC team moves fast to a major milestone: we're aiming for a 1.0.0 release!
>
> On behalf of the LDC team I am proud to announce the new 1.0.0-beta1 release!
> It is based on the 2.070.2 front-end and supports LLVM 3.5-3.8.
>
> We made great progress since the alpha1 version! The frontend level was raised to 2.070.2. (There will be no 2.069.2 based release.) On most supported platforms LDC can build itself.
>
> There are many highlights in this release:
> - Uncountable improvements to make LDC work on Windows, Linux/ARM, Android and iOS.
> - The Windows exception handling stuff, now working on Win32 and Win64 versions.
> 
>
> Thanks to everybody involved in making this happen!
>
> Regards,
> Kai

Congratulations!

On Monday, 25 April 2016 at 06:39:43 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
> 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

When installing to my user directory on Jessie:

I need to use:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/ldc/bin ~/ldc/bin/ldc2

Previous versions didn't exhibit this behavior,
~/ldc/bin/ldc2 was sufficient.

On Wednesday, 27 April 2016 at 08:18:25 UTC, Xiaoxi wrote:
> On Monday, 25 April 2016 at 06:39:43 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
>> 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
>
> When installing to my user directory on Jessie:
>
> I need to use:
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/ldc/bin ~/ldc/bin/ldc2
>
> Previous versions didn't exhibit this behavior,
> ~/ldc/bin/ldc2 was sufficient.

There was a regression in the beta that will be fixed:

https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1460

On Monday, 25 April 2016 at 06:39:43 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
>
> 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

Very happy with this release! Not only everything works as expected, but:
- GC can be enabled back in Windows builds now that it works,
- and the asm regression was fixed, so I can enable blobs of code back (+22.5% in 32-bit, +9% in 64-bit)