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

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 16:12:35 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> [...]
> Everyone should follow GDC's ABI, rather than trying to mimic 
> DMD calling convention. ;-)

GDC is working very well, and using it would actually be the 
natural choice for us as GCC is the default compiler.
However, there are a few problems with that:
  1) GDC doesn't compile a large amount of D code currently out 
there due to having an outdated standard library and runtime. 
While we would like to use it, it doesn't help if it just can't 
compile the things.

  2) GDC isn't part of the official GCC. This has quite wide 
reaching implications, most importantly other distros not 
offering it - in Fedora / Red Hat, this is the reason why GDC 
isn't available. This means fewer people test with GDC and we're 
basically compiling upstream projects with a compiler they never 
ever tested, potentially creating new issues that we can't easily 
forward upstream. This is less of an issue with LDC as LDC is 
more widely available in other distributions.