Is it possible to compile for other OS's on Windows using dmd?

On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 11:49:32 UTC, Bauss wrote:
> Is it possible to compile for other OS's on Windows using dmd?

This is what's known as cross compiling and is not currently supported by DMD at this time.

On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 12:54:00 UTC, Gary Willoughby wrote:
> On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 11:49:32 UTC, Bauss wrote:
>> Is it possible to compile for other OS's on Windows using dmd?
>
> This is what's known as cross compiling and is not currently supported by DMD at this time.

Any alternatives?

On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 15:00:05 UTC, Bauss wrote:
> On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 12:54:00 UTC, Gary Willoughby wrote:
>> On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 11:49:32 UTC, Bauss wrote:
>>> Is it possible to compile for other OS's on Windows using dmd?
>>
>> This is what's known as cross compiling and is not currently supported by DMD at this time.
>
> Any alternatives?

Fire up a VM of the target machine (easy with any of the *nix systems) and compile on that?

On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 15:00:05 UTC, Bauss wrote:
> On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 12:54:00 UTC, Gary Willoughby wrote:
>> On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 11:49:32 UTC, Bauss wrote:
>>> Is it possible to compile for other OS's on Windows using dmd?
>>
>> This is what's known as cross compiling and is not currently supported by DMD at this time.
>
> Any alternatives?

You might be able to lightly tweak ldc to do it: I was able to cross-compile druntime/phobos, their unit tests, and some small sample apps on a linux/x86 host to run on a linux/ARM target.

The problem isn't really the D compiler so much as the other needed tools and environment.  Dmd and the other D compilers are automatically configured to use your system linker and link against the system's C standard library.  Well, optlink or the Microsoft linker on Windows don't know how to link for linux or OS X!

So you have to set up linkers and C libraries for every other OS you want to build for on Windows.  It's possible: the Android NDK can be installed on Windows with Cygwin and compile C/C++ code for the various Android architectures.  But none of the D compilers have gone to all the trouble to provide that cross-compiling support out of the box for all the various OSs they support.

It's easier to just run each OS in a VM on top of Windows, as Colin said.