[SAOC 2026] MLIR support Weekly Update #5

[Asadbek]

Hello everyone,

This is the first week of Milestone 2. My PR adding the MLIR 
CMake infrastructure [1] has been merged, and the follow-up PR 
for the `inlineMLIR` feature [2] is now up for review. Hopefully, 
that will be merged soon to officially wrap up Milestone 1.

Since Milestone 2 doesn't strictly depend on the `inlineMLIR` PR, 
I went ahead and got started on it. The goal for this milestone 
is to lower the BetterC subset of D to the `arith` and `func` 
MLIR dialects.

I spent this week studying how LDC currently lowers the D AST to 
LLVM IR using its visitor classes, and I have started 
implementing the basic MLIR lowering logic. It is still early and 
not quite ready for a draft PR, so I will continue building this 
out and hope to have some working examples to share in next 
week's update.

Feedback and questions are welcome!

Best,
Asadbek

[1] https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/pull/5300
[2] https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/pull/5307