Which version to use?

[Johannes Pfau via D.gnu]

Am Thu, 24 Sep 2015 03:07:53 +0000
schrieb Jeremy DeHaan <dehaan.jeremiah at gmail.com>:

> On (my version of) Linux, gdc has an official apt repository, but 
> there also exists a download page with what appears to be a much 
> more recent version of gdc. So..which one should I use? I'd like 
> to have pre-built binaries for my library ready to go for users, 
> but I'm not sure which one I should build with.
> 
> Right now I am leaning towards the one on the download page due 
> to updates, bug fixes, etc, but many people will presumably use 
> whats in apt.
> 
> Suggestions?

The downloads from gdcproject.org/downloads provide more recent
frontend (<=> DMD) versions. The frontend introduces new features in
the language, so most D projects require very recent frontend versions.
Even the latest available GDC version right now (2.066) is two
versions behind DMD (2.068). The debian packages usually provide even
older frontend versions.

So if you use code which requires a newer frontend version you'll have
to use the downloads from gdcproject.org. Otherwise you can look up the
changelog here to check if you need/want any of the features or
bugfixes in newer frontends: http://dlang.org/changelog/index.html

The other version is the GCC version. While newer GCC versions might
produce better optimized code (https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-5/changes.html)
we recommend using the same GCC version as used by your Linux
distribution. The main reason for this is that there might be cases
where newer GCC versions are not compatible with older GDB versions.
However, you can usually use any GCC version.

Generally speaking distribution packages are easier to support as
they're built explicitly for one Linux distribution. The packages from
gdcproject.org have to work on many Linux versions which sometimes can
be difficult (if your distribution installs libraries into unusual
directories, the compiler might not find them, ...). However, we
haven't really heard about problems with the packages from
gdcproject.org, so they should work fine for most distributions.


BTW: Shipping prebuilt D libraries is uncommon. The main compilers
(gdc/dmd/ldc) do not produce compatible libraries. Libraries compiled
with other frontend versions are usually not compatible even when
compiled with the same compiler. If you want to provide binaries most
people will probably use the newest frontend version, so I'd say use
the version from gdcproject.org