On Monday, 5 November 2018 at 13:53:50 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Friday, 2 November 2018 at 21:04:13 UTC, kinke wrote:
>> Glad to announce the first beta for LDC 1.13:
>>
>> * Based on D 2.083.0.
>> * The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore.
>
> Very cool! And very scary too, we'll have to verify the transcendantal precision and memcpy performance :)

Don't worry, we're not using anything from the MinGW runtime itself - just functions exported by the MS DLLs and some minimal startup/shutdown skeleton (`mainCRTStartup` entrypoint etc.). We (incl. DMD) are just using their .def files as basis for the generated import libraries.

On Saturday, 3 November 2018 at 16:33:36 UTC, kinke wrote:

> I figured it'd be for a lot of Windows users. Why not explicitly express your gratitude with a little 'thank you' then? After all, that little bullet point in the release notes easily took some 40 hours of my spare time, and some appreciation can work wonders to keep motivation up.

Thanks for your work. I don't actually use Windows, but this is much bigger than just one user, as it makes D a viable option for data science. It allows the use of D by millions of R users who mostly know nothing about compiled languages. If you're looking for D's killer app, this is it. But that wasn't possible without a sane Windows installation experience - and having to tangle with VS made it unrealistic for 99.9%+ of all users. That restriction is now gone. Hopefully that gives you motivation to keep working.

On Saturday, 3 November 2018 at 16:33:36 UTC, kinke wrote:
> I figured it'd be for a lot of Windows users. Why not explicitly express your gratitude with a little 'thank you' then? After all, that little bullet point in the release notes easily took some 40 hours of my spare time, and some appreciation can work wonders to keep motivation up.

Can send you some cryptocurrency if you want.

On Monday, 5 November 2018 at 14:46:25 UTC, kinke wrote:
> On Monday, 5 November 2018 at 13:53:50 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
>> On Friday, 2 November 2018 at 21:04:13 UTC, kinke wrote:
>>> Glad to announce the first beta for LDC 1.13:
>>>
>>> * Based on D 2.083.0.
>>> * The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore.
>>
>> Very cool! And very scary too, we'll have to verify the transcendantal precision and memcpy performance :)
>
> Don't worry, we're not using anything from the MinGW runtime itself - just functions exported by the MS DLLs and some minimal startup/shutdown skeleton (`mainCRTStartup` entrypoint etc.). We (incl. DMD) are just using their .def files as basis for the generated import libraries.

I don't understand, llvm_exp for example translate to a call to the C stdlib exp() IIRC. That is currently in the MS runtime, no?

On Tuesday, 6 November 2018 at 15:08:47 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Monday, 5 November 2018 at 14:46:25 UTC, kinke wrote:
>> On Monday, 5 November 2018 at 13:53:50 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
>>> Very cool! And very scary too, we'll have to verify the transcendantal precision and memcpy performance :)
>>
>> Don't worry, we're not using anything from the MinGW runtime itself - just functions exported by the MS DLLs and some minimal startup/shutdown skeleton (`mainCRTStartup` entrypoint etc.). We (incl. DMD) are just using their .def files as basis for the generated import libraries.
>
> I don't understand, llvm_exp for example translate to a call to the C stdlib exp() IIRC. That is currently in the MS runtime, no?

Yep, and still is, as I said. We don't use any MinGW functions at all, so nothing changes in this regard, no need to worry about MinGW's 80-bit `long double`, their different C++ mangling, their .a static library format or their DWARF debug info. You're still targeting windows-msvc. We only need the MinGW .def files because Microsoft shamefully doesn't allow distribution of their static & import libs.

As stated in the readme, using the MS toolchain is obviously still supported.

On Tuesday, 6 November 2018 at 21:25:53 UTC, kinke wrote:
> We don't use any MinGW functions at all

Let me rephrase that: the new MinGW-w64-based libs don't *include* any MinGW functions at all, not a single one. So you cannot use one by accident. ;) - For more in-depth infos, check out the linked PRs in the release log.

On Tuesday, 6 November 2018 at 21:42:42 UTC, kinke wrote:
> On Tuesday, 6 November 2018 at 21:25:53 UTC, kinke wrote:
>> We don't use any MinGW functions at all
>
> Let me rephrase that: the new MinGW-w64-based libs don't *include* any MinGW functions at all, not a single one. So you cannot use one by accident. ;) - For more in-depth infos, check out the linked PRs in the release log.

Thanks for the details. A cursory read made it seem as if another C runtime was used: sorry for this.

On 2018-11-02 22:04, kinke wrote:
> Glad to announce the first beta for LDC 1.13:
> 
> * Based on D 2.083.0.
> * 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 for GDB.
> 
> Full release log and downloads: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v1.13.0-beta1
> 
> Thanks to all contributors!

It's awesome to see that you have a version based on DMD 2.083.0 already.

Are there any plans on updating the bundled Dub version? It has a regression that was fixed in 1.12.0.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Friday, 2 November 2018 at 21:04:13 UTC, kinke wrote:
> Glad to announce the first beta for LDC 1.13:
> * Based on D 2.083.0.
> * The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient

I'm late to the thank-you party, but yes, this is huge for me, too.

I develop on Linux. For Windows binaries, I've run the DMD 32-bit toolchain in Wine because I've shied away from installing MSVS to create 64-bit Windows binaries. The LDC Win64 beta was a breeze to get working in Wine, looking forward to use it!

-- Simon

On Wednesday, 7 November 2018 at 13:23:59 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Are there any plans on updating the bundled Dub version? It has a regression that was fixed in 1.12.0.

I upgraded it one day after releasing beta1, as I sadly forgot to check for a newer dub version before publishing. I.e., the CI builds already feature dub v1.12.