GCC 10.1 Released

[Iain Buclaw]

As of last week (7th May), GCC 10.1 has now been released.

For the D language front-end, only a small number of incremental, 
but substantial changes have gone in.  Most notable of the lot 
has been the addition of `static foreach`, which makes the 
front-end (the C++ port of DMD) feature complete with DMD version 
2.076.1.  There is also now a configurable separation between 
building Druntime and Phobos, which has allowed many targets to 
have gained library support for building a D runtime library by 
disabling the build of Phobos.

See [1] for more information about changes in GDC 10.1.  Sources 
are available from any of the GCC mirrors [2], or you can clone 
the git repository [3].


[[GCC 11 Development]]

Now the development cycle has started again, I have ambitions for 
a number disruptive changes to land during the next release cycle.

1. Switch implementation of the compiler from C++ to D.  Rebase 
front-end with DMD master.  Taking into account the alignment of 
release cycles, the aim is for GCC 11.1 to have DMD 
2.098.0-beta.1 or 2.098.0-rc.1.  The GCC 11.2 release will then 
have DMD 2.098.1, plus any other fixes that have gone into stable 
before the master/stable merge.

2. Update the D demangling library to be in sync with current 
spec, down-streaming this to GDB/Binutils.  This'll include the 
ability to decode recent(-ish) ABI changes such as back 
references, as well as decoding @live and variadic parameter 
attributes.

3. Dynamically generate C bindings from headers, possibly using a 
new command-line switch -fdump-d-spec where one can use gcc (or 
g++, gfortran, gccgo...) to read in sources/headers of one 
language, and write out bindings in D.  The primary use case of 
this would be to drop the manual maintenance of core.sys.*; 
core.stdc.* (and core.stdcxx.*?); and instead generate these 
modules during the build of libphobos.

4. Turn on library support for the platforms FreeBSD, NetBSD, 
DragonflyBSD, OpenBSD, MinGW, Darwin, HP-UX/PA, and AIX/PowerPC.  
Though given that there'll be a need to bootstrap, expect these 
ports to also get pushed to a GCC 10.x release too.

I'm not going to tire you with anything more on my TODO list 
(there are over 50 items), but if any thing sounds interesting, 
or you feel you could help in any way, please don't hesitate to 
jump on the #gdc channel in either the Dlang Slack or Freenode 
IRC.


[[Nota Bene]]

No sooner had the RC for GCC 10 branched, that a bug in 
std.net.curl was raised relating to the handling of HTTP/2 
requests (it can't, as it turns out).  This patch [4] is being 
backported for the 10.2 release, which is highly important for 
tools such as dub to be able to function correctly.  The patch 
has already been applied to Debian and Ubuntu, it would be kind 
if other package maintainers do the same for their distributions.

Having a look at my own personal site, it is clearly in need of 
some tender loving care.  A minor styling improvement will be 
done soon, along with a refresh of all documentation hosted on 
the site to better reflect the situation now, as opposed to 8 
years ago.

I'll also be triggering a rebuild of D compilers for all 
supported GCC targets, and pushing them to the compiler explorer 
site [5] maybe sometime next week (there's 198 of them, so please 
excuse the slowness of the process).

Until next year...

Regards
Iain.

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-10/changes.html#d
[2] https://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html
[3] git://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git
[4] 
https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/dlang/phobos/pull/6752.diff
[5] https://explore.dgnu.org