I had to install D on a new Mac machine. The initial experience is pretty poor right now. Tried searching, but didn't see any other threads about this?

1. dlang.org directs you to download the DMD2.pkg - however, MacOS will not allow you to open this: "Apple could not verify 'DMD2.pkg' is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy." - you have to work around this by going to system privacy settings and enabling it. Not a good first impression though.

2. Once installed, dmd just insta-crashes:

$ dmd
zsh: segmentation fault dmd

This is due to a known (and fixed on nightly) issue with TLS changes on the most recent Mac, but you'll only find out about this if you go googling for the error.

3. Finally, since dmd doesn't support arm64 yet, unless you are careful you are very likely to run into various linking issues with e.g. libraries installed with arm64 with homebrew.

This is all a bit unfortunate, especially when we see e.g. the recent thread on hackernews for folks excited about D. I'm sure more than a handful of people decided to try out D after that post, and probably we lost a bunch of them due to these issue.

In terms of solutions:

1. Looks like we just need to notarise the .pkg? Probably needs the foundation to setup an Apple Developer account if it doesn't already have one, then it should just be a matter of running some Apple command-line tools as part of deployment.

2. Really, this should have been hot-fixed once the fix made it to nightly. I understand a new compiler is coming soon, so maybe this won't be a problem for long, but perhaps worth retrospecting on how this managed to stay broken for so long (appears to be a few months now that latest dmd crashes on latest Mac).

3. I think this has been discussed before, but perhaps we should direct people to ldc2 for now as the main download? Or perhaps just make it clear on the website that dmd is x86_64 only for now and provide the alternatives on the homepage.

On Saturday, 5 July 2025 at 10:36:05 UTC, Peter Alexander wrote:

Maybe nobody is using DMD on Mac? The download page doesn't mention anything about any of these problems. At a minimum, I'd say there should be a link to the previous release and a note about the bug with a link to the LDC download.

On Saturday, 5 July 2025 at 10:36:05 UTC, Peter Alexander wrote:

I see you are new to D community :)
DMD is not working on Arm

So for Apple silicon you have only LDC option.
There are some experiments with GDC, but the only really working solution is LDC.

Regarding improvements on official page - don’t waste time, so many proposals were already taken to DLF

They don’t care

I mean they will say they do, but really they don’t

Because words are nothing, only actions matter
And there will be no actions.
But it is fine. Of course some people left the community, but for those who left it is fine.

We still can use D for our hobby projects :)

On Saturday, 5 July 2025 at 17:19:54 UTC, Sergey wrote:

Not that new! Long time D user here, was quite an active contributor back in ~2013. Recently been checking things out again. I've been using LDC on Mac for quite a while, but was interested to see what the DMD experience is like with Rosetta.

I think people do care, but it's a community effort and people need to do the work for little to nothing in return. Hopefully I'll be all to make actual contributions soon, but for now can at least report issues.

On Saturday, 5 July 2025 at 17:58:35 UTC, Peter Alexander wrote:

Oh very nice! Welcome back
Feel free to join Discord as well

Many interactions (actually most of interactions) are happening there now :)

On Saturday, 5 July 2025 at 18:00:15 UTC, Sergey wrote:

Thanks for the heads up, will check it out.

On Saturday, 5 July 2025 at 17:19:54 UTC, Sergey wrote:

DLF does care; that’s why they decided to sponsor me looking into solving issues like this. Life just happened in the intervening time so things ground to a halt for a while. I am slowly getting back to finding and solving issues w/ the Mac experience.

Looking into potentially providing a pkg for LDC that will be signed and notarized by me. As for DMD; that’ll have to wait until the arm64 support is fully functional.

On Saturday, 5 July 2025 at 18:54:32 UTC, Luna wrote:

The problem is that someone looking at the downloads page would not know this. That needs to be changed.

On Saturday, 5 July 2025 at 20:31:34 UTC, Lance Bachmeier wrote:

Yeah, once I get things set up I'll be talking with DLF about making a PR updating the downloads page.