LDC 1.1.0-beta6

[Nicholas Wilson via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Tuesday, 13 December 2016 at 21:30:05 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 12/13/2016 02:37 PM, kinke wrote:
>> Hey all,
>>
>> on behalf of the LDC team I am proud to announce the new 
>> 1.1.0-beta6
>> release!
>> It's based on the 2.071.2 frontend and standard library and 
>> supports
>> LLVM 3.5 up to current trunk (4.0).
>
> This is awesome! Could you please tell what the expected lag 
> time is between a dmd release and an ldc release? Also, 
> obviously what we could do to improve that. Thanks! -- Andrei

Do you mean the time it takes for LDC master to reach DMD release 
parity, or do you mean e.g. LDC 1.0.0 -> 1.1.0?

The former is dependent on merging the ddmdfe in ours and the 
dealing with any conflicts in the changes we make to ddmdfe, (we 
bracket these in version(IN_LLVM) and version(IN_LLVM_MSVC) 
blocks to ease this). Johan is usually pretty quick, but 
identifying and dealing with any regressions that arise takes 
longer.

The latter depends on the feature set we intend to implement and 
bugs and regressions and user feedback. For example 1.1.0-beta3 
introduced a regression with dub causing all dub projects to fail 
to build, we got that report but not much else because hardly 
anyone was using beta3.

Someone (was it you?) suggested splitting the ddmdfe off (or was 
it have everything under the dlang repo?), and have it be a 
dependency for each of the backends, so that the frontend stays 
in lockstep and we can identify regressions earlier, not sure how 
this would impact GDC. We also maintain druntime in a similar 
fashion to ddmdfe, although with a lot more additions for llvm 
features, probably less worth doing but still worth considering.

This would also have the advantage of increased cross-visibility 
thus reducing regression times. The same repo solution would also 
increase the number of people familiar with the LDC codebase and 
therefore likely to help report and fix issues.