Hi everyone!

On behalf of the LDC team I announce the new 1.3.0 beta1 release!
It is based on the 2.073.2 front-end and supports LLVM 3.5-4.0.

It is the first release ever made at DConf. Feedback is highly welcome - just talk to me!

Highlights of this release are the new frontend, the removed dependency on libconfig and shared library support on all supported platforms.
LDC now creates static libraries with the help of LLVM instead of using the operating system ar. This allows for cross-compiling static libraries without additional tools.
There is also new support for Visual Studio 2017.
Be sure to read the change log at the GitHub release page for all the details. The packages are available for download at the same page.
https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v1.3.0-beta1

Please note: Due to a problem with the build scripts, not all binary distributions contain the shared libraries. This will be fixed in the next beta release.

MD5 checksums for the release packages:

b49f407fca416cebfd752c2fd2b1a5e1  ldc-1.3.0-beta1-src.tar.gz
ad1949145956159d70aa494524cccdd2  ldc2-1.3.0-beta1-freebsd-x86_64.tar.xz
445f16539b9b6b4c6bb9f9d0f373cd1a  ldc2-1.3.0-beta1-linux-x86_64.tar.xz
84fb26949413ca3e2950cc5e48a9fb28  ldc2-1.3.0-beta1-linux-x86.tar.xz
09218dd06b86adc1caa2fcf94a16da59  ldc2-1.3.0-beta1-win32-msvc.zip
43091d82d59ba0889b50df6a53b88bd2  ldc2-1.3.0-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 and LLVM 4.0.0. They work on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (or later) without installing additional software.

The OS X binaries and the FreeBSD binaries are built with LLVM 4.0.0.

The Win32 and Win64 MSVC versions are built with VS2015 and LLVM 3.9.1 (due to a regression in LLVM 4.0).

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