Bootstrapping GDC with DMD

[Brian Callahan]

On Tuesday, 14 July 2026 at 15:47:12 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> 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.

Thanks Iain! I probably would have used your scripts had I found 
them before writing my own :)

~Brian