Is GDC a solid option versus LDC?

[Iain Buclaw]

On Friday, 4 March 2022 at 15:17:49 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 05/03/2022 4:05 AM, rempas wrote:
>> However, I'm really skeptical as to why people seem to prefer 
>> LDC and I wonder if GDC is not as stable and reliable as LDC 
>> or if most code that uses recent code doesn't work in GDC. I 
>> have also heard that LDC get support for new things faster 
>> than GDC. Is that true? And if yes, then for how much 
>> difference are we talking about?
>
> GDC has a few issues that LDC simply doesn't have.
>
> For instance GCC can only depend on a binary of the last 
> version of GCC (my knowledge of that is what I've heard from 
> Iain).
>

There's no strong dependency on GCC.  What you probably mean is 
that there are gcc-specific options used when building the D 
front-end in GDC.

However, I've successfully built GDC using DMD and LDC as the 
bootstrapping compiler, but that requires you to have a wrapper 
script that converts GCC-style options to their DMD or LDC 
equivalent.

> What this means is its stuck using a frontend that is based 
> upon a version that was still C++ and that is oldddddddd. Many 
> years old.
>

You mean, stable. GDC is stable. :-)

> Right now GDC is close to getting the frontend written in D, 
> which from what I hear should be next release. At which point 
> it'll keep up.

Correct, next release in a couple months will be the first 
self-hosted version, probably based on 2.100-beta (and 2.100.x 
when the release goes out).