Terminix Stable 1.2.0 Released

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Saturday, 23 July 2016 at 17:00:45 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> On 23 July 2016 at 16:24, Matthias Klumpp via 
> Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> 
> wrote:
>>
>> 3) Making LDC available for more architectures, or making GDC 
>> support a
>> higher version of the Phobos standard library and build shared 
>> libraries.
>> At time, LDC is the better fit because of shared library 
>> support and higher
>> Phobos version. Current D projects are hard to compile with 
>> GDC because of
>> the latter reason.
>> More architectures are not per-se essential, but would be 
>> awesome to have.
>> This feature request summarizes the status of arch support for 
>> D in free
>> compilers: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1636
>>
>
> Well, as GDC is supporting the last C++ release, the only next 
> logical step would be to get bootstrapping from 2.068 to 2.071 
> or whatever version of the frontend has sufficiently ironed out 
> all compatibility regressions.

I would love to use GDC for Debian, but a compiler is really 
useless if it doesn't compile 90% of the interesting D projects 
out there...
LDC however, can do that.

> This means that backporting compiler fixes and the standard 
> library from upstream is acceptably on the cards.  It's just 
> that the feature-set will remain the same as 2.068.

API/ABI breaks in Phobos are really, really annoying - but GDC 
having an ancient Phobos version is even more annoying, since 
this basically ties us to using LDC.
GDC doesn't compile the majority of D projects ot there, and for 
my own I need to explicitly add support for it, e.g. by 
backporting standard library bits and shipping them with the 
source code.

>>
>> 5) Have hardening supported for the D compilers: 
>> https://wiki.debian.org/HardeningWalkthrough
>>
>
> As per the wiki, if you use GDC then there's nothing for you to 
> do.

Since the normal toolchain of Linux distributions is GCC based 
and GCC has a pretty good backend with all the features we need, 
using GDC would be a good choice.
But LDCs shared-library support is a pretty big deal for distros, 
and together with the fact that GDC doesn't compile most of the 
interesting new projects, LDC is the way to go.

Furthermore, since GDC is out-of-tree, some distributions like 
Fedora don't have it / can't easily add it.

I would love to see this resolved - is this a manpower problem? 
Or are there other blockers?