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

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 10 April 2017 at 19:48, Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> 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 having an outdated standard library and runtime.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.
>

Master sports Phobos 2.071.  Someone will have to see whether latter
versions can be built using it.


>  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.
>

This is an unfortunate distribution problem, things would be different
if GCC were more like a library.  It's not like anyone is helping me
with the push.  I am ultimately the one who is doing the tens of
thousands of lines of code changes, and writing up the thousands of
lines of documentation just to make it lean and presentable.  ;-)