Glad to announce LDC 1.13:

* Based on D 2.083.1.
* The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore.
* Substantial debug info improvements.
* New command-line option `-fvisibility=hidden` to hide functions/globals not marked as export, to reduce the size of shared libraries.

Full release log and downloads: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v1.13.0

New Wiki page highlighting cross-compilation: https://wiki.dlang.org/Cross-compiling_with_LDC

Thanks to all contributors!

On Sunday, 16 December 2018 at 15:57:25 UTC, kinke wrote:
> Glad to announce LDC 1.13:
>
> * Based on D 2.083.1.
> * The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore.
> * Substantial debug info improvements.
> * New command-line option `-fvisibility=hidden` to hide functions/globals not marked as export, to reduce the size of shared libraries.
>
> Full release log and downloads: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v1.13.0
>
> New Wiki page highlighting cross-compilation: https://wiki.dlang.org/Cross-compiling_with_LDC
>
> Thanks to all contributors!

Excellent work. LDC has caught up with DMD on the stable! Self sufficient Windows build is possible because of MS stable ABI? Is it guaranteed to be stable hereafter? Thanks for all your work.

On Sunday, 16 December 2018 at 17:48:43 UTC, Arun Chandrasekaran wrote:
> Self sufficient Windows build is possible because of MS stable ABI?

MS has nothing to with it; in fact, if it wasn't for their ridiculously restrictive license, we could and would have shipped with the official libs for years.
Self-sufficiency is now possible due to the existence of MinGW[-w64] and work from Rainer Schütze (using the MinGW .def files as basis for the COFF libs included with DMD) and myself (adapting that scheme for MinGW-w64 and LDC). See the linked PRs in the release log if interested in more details.

> Is it guaranteed to be stable hereafter?

It currently targets the Visual C++ 2015 runtime, as that's the last one supported by MinGW-w64. That version will likely change over time.

On Sunday, 16 December 2018 at 15:57:25 UTC, kinke wrote:
> Glad to announce LDC 1.13:
>
> * Based on D 2.083.1.
> * The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore.
> * Substantial debug info improvements.
> * New command-line option `-fvisibility=hidden` to hide functions/globals not marked as export, to reduce the size of shared libraries.
>
> Full release log and downloads: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v1.13.0
>
> New Wiki page highlighting cross-compilation: https://wiki.dlang.org/Cross-compiling_with_LDC
>
> Thanks to all contributors!

Awesome, thanks!

How can the old visual studio linker be enabled? I tried to specify it trough -linker but it collides with the dmd linker.exe.

On Tuesday, 18 December 2018 at 10:45:13 UTC, Radu wrote:
> How can the old visual studio linker be enabled? I tried to specify it trough -linker but it collides with the dmd linker.exe.

It's all in the README.txt, as mentioned in the release notes. ;)
Use an absolute path in `-linker` if DMD's optlink takes precedence in your PATH.

On Sunday, 16 December 2018 at 15:57:25 UTC, kinke wrote:
> Glad to announce LDC 1.13:
>
> * Based on D 2.083.1.
> * The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore.
> * Substantial debug info improvements.
> * New command-line option `-fvisibility=hidden` to hide functions/globals not marked as export, to reduce the size of shared libraries.
>
> Full release log and downloads: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v1.13.0
>
> New Wiki page highlighting cross-compilation: https://wiki.dlang.org/Cross-compiling_with_LDC
>
> Thanks to all contributors!

Native Android packages for the Termux app have been updated, including an Android/x64 package for the first time (with the std.variant issue from the last beta now fixed). While no Android device uses x64, many x64 and AArch64 Chromebooks support installing Android apps like Termux, so if you have a Chromebook, you can now start writing and compiling D code on there too: :)

https://medium.com/@clumsycontraria/learning-to-code-on-a-bone-stock-chromebook-a7d0e75303bb

An Alpine build of ldc for Docker containers and microservices is also up now.