For the adventurous: News from the LDC/Linux front

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 8 July 2014 at 17:54:48 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am excited to share news about two changes that recently made 
> their way into the development version of LDC, changes that 
> might be interesting for many of you Linux users out there.
>
> The first is that LDC now supports linker-level dead code 
> elimination on Linux. If you happen to be familiar with the 
> -f{function,data}-sections/--gc-sections options of the GNU 
> toolchain, their equivalent is now enabled by default. For a 
> set of small-ish programs that make use of different parts of 
> Phobos, I've seen executable size improvements of close to 4x 
> (!) in my tests. However, as --gc-sections is known to 
> occasionally cause trouble with third-party code that relies on 
> specific linker behavior, this optimization can be disabled 
> with a new LDC switch, -disable-linker-strip-dead.
>
> And secondly, proper support for building druntime/Phobos as 
> shared libraries and loading D shared objects dynamically has 
> now arrived in LDC! As you might be aware, Martin Nowak has 
> spent a considerable amount of effort on adding runtime loading 
> capabilities to DMD and druntime during the last year or so. 
> LDC now offers the same level of functionality, to a good part 
> based on Martin's solid work. To build a copy of LDC with 
> druntime/Phobos as a shared library, which is also required for 
> proper runtime loading, simply pass -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON to 
> CMake. Oh, and for now this is Linux-only too, sorry.
>
> Even though I am currently not aware of any remaining issues, 
> there are likely a few rough edges still. To be able to 
> confidently ship these features as part of the next release, 
> we'd very much appreciate early feedback. Just grab LDC from 
> Git master and let us know how things went over on 
> digitalmars.D.ldc. If you run into a specific bug, you can also 
> directly open a ticket at 
> https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues.
>
> Cheers,
> David

Those are probably best news from D world I have heard in last 
few months! Has anyone tried that on largish projects? Using GDC 
with --gc-sections has resulted in broken binaries sometimes but 
most likely it was the same ModuleInfo issue. Wonder how reliable 
it is in LDC.