[Issue 18656] New: Compile DUB with LDC

[d-bugmail at puremagic.com]

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18656

          Issue ID: 18656
           Summary: Compile DUB with LDC
           Product: D
           Version: D2
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P1
         Component: installer
          Assignee: nobody at puremagic.com
          Reporter: greensunny12 at gmail.com

Compiling DUB with all compilers yields to these binaries:


Compiler | Size
---------|------
DMD      | 17M
LDC      | 13M
GDC      | 19M

See also:

https://github.com/dlang/dub/pull/1369#discussion_r167407362

Note that LDC has LTO easily available which results in ~10% performance
improvement and also a noticeable binary size reduction.

DUB is currently compiled with DMD, because LDC doesn't support showing the
stack for exceptions, but imho the vast increase in speed and reduced side
justifies overlooking this. After all, this is a production release - not a
debug build.

Performance-wise I haven't done big tests, but a build of vibe.d without
needing to rebuild goes reproducible down from 0.22s to 0.15s

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