Download page needs a tidy up

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Thu Aug 22 17:05:38 PDT 2013


On 23 August 2013 07:49, David Nadlinger <code at klickverbot.at> wrote:

> On Thursday, 22 August 2013 at 03:07:39 UTC, Manu wrote:
>
>> And why is there no LDC binary?
>>
>
> There are links to the LDC Linux/OS X binaries on the dlang.org download
> page.
>
> As for the Windows/MinGW32 binaries, the last LDC release does officially
> include them (see the release announcement), but the MinGW port is still
> very much in an alpha/beta state.
>

Oh okay. Well it would definitely be worth writing that somewhere.
I knew it worked (more-or-less) on Windows, I've built it from source
before and created working code. But last time I used it there was still no
Win64 exceptions.
My thread is really about the experience as an end-user trying to get a
working compiler; It shouldn't be hard.

For example, there is still at least one wrong-code issues with 80 bit
> reals, and the test suite does not completely pass yet. Somewhat contrary
> to GDC, in case of LDC there are actual released versions that are
> guaranteed to be stable to a certain extent (i.e. the test suite passes on
> all relevant systems, …), and I was afraid that prematurely advertising the
> relatively fresh MinGW port would draw a wrong picture of the overall
> quality.
>

I think people would appreciate this, but it's probably worth writing this
clearly on the download page.
A binary marked very clearly as alpha/beta, and perhaps a list of known
issues might be nice for end users to access at a glance.

As the GDC/MinGW binaries are probably not more stable either, though, yet
> are linked on the dlang.org download page, I guess we should add the LDC
> MinGW link to the page as well, if maybe qualified with an "experimental"
> note.
>

Mmm.
Well, I can't make the GDC binaries work at all... there are missing
dependencies.

Another issue is that a fairly recent mingw-w64 snapshot is needed in
> addition to the LDC download for GCC (linker, libraries). Older ones don't
> have my necessary fixes yet, and I don't know if they have made it into the
> "original" MinGW (without -w64) project yet. What would be the best way to
> add this to the/a download page?
>

Would it be better to produce a distribution package that includes the
working mingw snapshot? It's quite annoying when a distro package has
dependencies.
I think Windows end-users aren't used to meticulous versioning like Linux
users. Things like version numbers are rarely in the paths/filenames. The
result of this is, they might already have a mingw on their system that
they presume is fine (or don't know is fine), or may be reluctant to
install another instance of a package they already have, thinking it's
basically the same.
Putting everything in the one package sounds more fool-proof to me.

Just a thought that might be convenient for users would be if LDC and GDC
collaborated on a single complete mingw package that included both GDC and
LDC compilers... Perhaps annoying to maintain/coordinate, but I'd say at
this point, most users will end out with both toolchains on their system
anyway, and when you have multiple mingw installations on a machine, the
PATH variable get's kinda awkward.
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