gdc in Linux distros recommended?

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 19 October 2016 at 18:01, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On 10/18/2016 07:02 PM, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>>
>> I have a friend who has started writing a library in D.
>>
>> Although I recommended that he should use a recent dmd or ldc, he thinks
>> gdc is a better candidate because it's "available to the masses" through
>> Linux distros similar to how gcc is. Although he has a good point, the
>> gdc that came with his distro does not even support @nogc.
>>
>> Thoughts? Can you please tell him to change his mind! :p
>>
>> Ali
>
>
> The last GDC release is stuck all the way back at DMDFE v2.066, which is
> over two years old. Very few libs/projects are going to still be supporting
> that, there's just too much limitation going back that far. LDC had been
> keeping up much better.
>

The core devs are becoming much more receptive to the idea of a
release that has fixes maintained for longer periods of time.  While I
welcome this, it may have come too little, too late.

And GDC is using the 2.068 feature set, plus a lot of bug fixes from
later versions.  I guess you could call it 2.068.5.  :-)

> Due to incompatibilities and necessary features/bugfixes, pretty much all of
> my projects have already been forced to drop support for DMDFE v2.066, and
> GDC in the process. And I *prefer* to maintain compatibility as far back as
> I can.
>
> If his lib isn't tested to support up-to-date D compilers (especially the
> import changes in 2.070, but there's other stuff as well), that's going to
> prevent a lot of people from being able to use his lib. So much for
> availability to the masses.
>

The fixes to import behaviour only breaks forwards compatibility, not
backwards compatibility.

The problem with compatibility is a library problem, not a compiler IMO.