Using dmd on older machines

[Tomas Lindquist Olsen]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Denis Koroskin <2korden at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:14:44 +0300, Tomas Lindquist Olsen
> <tomas.l.olsen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Michel Fortin
>> <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2009-03-11 04:50:37 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound1 at digitalmars.com>
>>> said:
>>>
>>>> The source works just fine. The binaries don't. The new lib distros
>>>> don't
>>>> include the old lib, and vice versa. Often the missing lib isn't
>>>> available.
>>>> It's an ongoing nuisance.
>>>>
>>>> It isn't like Windows, where the basic api's have been unchanged for
>>>> nearly 20 years.
>>>>
>>>> Mac OSX is the worst of the lot, there you get a "bus error" if you
>>>> build
>>>> for 10.5 and run it on 10.4.
>>>
>>> Yeah, the error message is bad. But on Mac OS X if you build for 10.4
>>> (either by building on 10.4 or using the 10.4 SDK bundled with Xcode)
>>> it'll
>>> be forward-compatible with the newer versions of Mac OS X yet to come.
>>> For
>>> instance, I can run apps compiled on 10.0 quite well on 10.5, with no
>>> tweaking at all. Seems on Linux if you choose the old lib it won't run on
>>> the newer distos. That looks worse to me.
>>
>> This is usually not a problem as most linux software is free (as in
>> freedom) and has open source code though.
>>
>> Commercial applications can simply provide multiple binaries. Just
>> like the situation is getting for XP/Vista as well (I know, it's only
>> really games, and it's not really the same situation, but anyway ...)
>>
>
> It's more like x86/x86_64 situation.
>
>> DMD source code being available is a good start, but as I understand
>> it, Linux distributions are still not allowed to redistribute it ? Or
>> binaries of a modified source build ?
>>
>> -Tomas
>>
>
> Is there a need for that? Gentoo ebuild can automatically fetch source code
> from digitalmars.com and compile the binary (given the ebuild, of course),
> and I believe other distros can do the same.
>

Maybe it's not so bad as I think, but sometimes a build fails, and
beginner programmers who, lets say wanted to try D, has no means to
fix that, and the binary is broken ...

-Tomas