Bootstrapping GDC with DMD

[Iain Buclaw]

On Monday, 13 July 2026 at 18:14:34 UTC, Brian Callahan wrote:
> Hi all —
>
> In case it is useful to anyone else, I documented how I 
> bootstrapped GDC with DMD, with a freely available tool so that 
> you can too.
>
> https://briancallahan.net/blog/20260713.html
>
> ~Brian

Thanks for the write-up.

The GCC ports for Darwin (also PPC) and Solaris (x86 and SPARC) 
regularly(-ish?) test bootstrapping the current mainline version 
of D with the oldest supported version of GDC - there's a reason 
why it says 9.4, and not 9.x.

[Darwin is a bit more involved as they test bootstrap from 
apple-gcc 4.2 -> gcc 17.x, with all the odd jumps in between for 
Ada, C++, and D]

You are correct that there's nothing preventing the use of 
another D compiler to bootstrap GDC. So long as it can create a 
static executable, it will do.

For the sake of comparing notes, I did put out a little 
proof-of-concept gist around the time of the 12.1 release, as at 
least one distro packager asked at the time.

dmd: 
https://gist.github.com/ibuclaw/73f91fd66b5d4a1a6ad29d739be627c1
ldc: 
https://gist.github.com/ibuclaw/e6733142a8644ffb53106cc9986372fa

Iain.