ldc-developers/ldc v0.12.0

LDC 0.12.0

on GitHub

Big news:

• Frontend, druntime and Phobos are at version 2.063.2. Building druntime/Phobos as shared libraries is not supported yet, but will likely be in the next 2.064-based release.
• -march/-mcpu now behave as intended: -march selects the target architecture (x86, arm, …), -mcpu the CPU model to optimize for. This is different from the GCC convention, but matches the other LLVM tools. Use -mcpu=native to optimize for the host CPU (pre-0.11.0 LDC versions did this by default).
• -release no longer disables bounds checking in @safe code. Use -disable-boundscheck to disable it for all functions (-noboundscheck in (L)DMD).
• Exception chaining is now properly supported (#409).
• Rudimentary support for extern(C++) has been implemented (#412).

Platform support:

• Linux/OS X on x86/x86_64 are stable as usual, Win32/MinGW has received a several critical bug fixes and is ready for widespread testing. OS X requires LLVM 3.2 due to a regression in LLVM 3.3
• LDC builds druntime, Phobos and a Hello World program on Linux/ARM. If you are interested in helping to finish ARM support, please get in touch with us.
• Work on Linux/PPC32 has started.
• LDC now runs on FreeBSD (#451). Some issues are still unresolved (#495, #496).

Bug fixes:

• Assigning array literals to static arrays and certain immutable slices no longer triggers a GC allocation (#493).
• Debug info for static arrays, vectors and enums has been improved.
• Pure DDoc files (.dd) are now accepted.
• Several issues regarding vector and static arary initialization have been fixed (#419, #420).
• Destructors for (rvalue) struct used in opApply are now called properly (#427).
• Packed structs are now emitted correctly (#430).
• String enums now work as AA keys (#440).
• T.init for static arrays no longer emits an instruction per element (#119).
• String constants are now emitted as unnamed_addr, allowing them to be combined during optimization.
• Fixed several nested function handling issues (#447, #454, #497).
• Worked around a crash where the frontend generates an invalid AST for nested structs (#470).
• Fixed several real wrong-code bugs on Win32/MinGW (#441).
• assert(0) now generates trap instructions in release mode (like DMD does).
• -mattr=help and -mcpu=help now displays the CPU targeting help even without source files given (#505).
• -disable-fp-elim, which is no longer exposed by LLVM by default, is supported again, also fixing -gs for LDMD (#502).
• ldmd2 -c a.d b.d … no longer creates a single object file.
• LDMD now accepts (ignores) the -quiet flag as advertised.
• LDMD now creates output directories if they do not already exist (#480).

Building LDC:

• LLVM 3.0 is no longer supported. LDC can be used with LLVM 3.1–3.4svn (at the time of release). On OS X, use LLVM 3.2 due to a regression in the 3.3 release (#492).
• The LLVM version detection mechanism has been updated to prefer newer LLVM versions on Debian derivatives (#376).
• The bash completion files are now installed to /usr/share/bash-completion on Gentoo.

Internals:

• Some violations of the C++11 standard have been fixed (#370).
• Fixed a LDMD linking problem. (#452)
• Fixed an instance of reading uninitialized data in LDMD (#500).
• D bools are now stored as i8 on the LLVM IR level (#386). This should have no user-visible consequences, but avoids a few latent misoptimization bugs.
• Work has been started to align the frontend source code to the upstream DMD source. This will allow for faster frontend updates in the future.
• The names of the ModuleInfo data structures now end in __ModuleInfoZ, like they do for DMD. This should have no user-visible consequences apart from support in demanglers, etc.

Known regressions:

• Using nested structs with AAs can trigger an erroneous "cannot create associative array" error in some very specific circumstances (#407).
• Garbage collection does not work on Linux/PPC64.

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