The D ecosystem in Debian with free-as-in-freedom DMD

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 12:59:58 UTC, qznc wrote:
> [...]
> How do Debian and C++ go along? There is no ABI compatibility 
> between GCC and Clang afaik.

Clang offers compatibility for most basic features. There are 
some ABI compatibility issues though and you find them reported 
in the Clang/libc++ bugtrackers, and it's a pain (but the 
Clang/LLVM guys think they can do some ABI better/faster than 
what GCC offers, so some breakage is deliberate).
In Debian, GCC compiles everything as the system's default 
compiler, so at least inside the distribution we don't have to 
worry about potential incompatibilities. Since GCC also supports 
an enormous amount of architectures and has strong optimization, 
the case is different there.

In terms of "what happens when users use the OSes C++ libraries 
and compile with Clang instead of GCC" the situation is similar 
though: They might run into ABI issues (rarer though than with 
D). For the distro itself the problem doesn't exist though.