ldc-developers/ldc v0.17.0-beta2

LDC 0.17.0 beta 2

on GitHub

(Changes from 0.17.0-beta1 release are marked with (new) and gone.)

Big news:

• Frontend, druntime and Phobos are at version 2.068.2.
• The exception handling runtime now no longer allocates GC memory (although it still uses C malloc if there are more than 8 concurrent exceptions or nested finally blocks per thread). Note: Creating the Throwables in user code (e.g. new Exception("…")) and the Runtime.traceHandler may GC-allocate still. (Thanks for this goes to our newest contributor, @philpax).
• The @ldc.attributes.section("…") attribute can now be used to explicitly specify the object file section a variable or function is emitted to.
• The -static option can be used to create fully static binaries on Linux (akin to the GCC option of the same name).
• core.atomic.atomicOp() now exploits LLVM read-modify-write intrinsics instead of using a compare-and-swap loop. As side-effect, the atomic intrinsics in module ldc.intrinsics have been renamed:
  • llvm_atomic_cmp_swap => llvm_atomic_cmp_xchg
  • llvm_atomic_swap => llvm_atomic_rmw_xchg
  • llvm_atomic_load_* => llvm_atomic_rmw_*

Platform support:

• The compiler now supports NetBSD. (#1247) (Thanks for this goes to @nrTQgc.) (new)
• The float ABI can now be derived from the second field of the triple. E.g. the hardfloat ABI is used if triple armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi is given. (#1253) (new)
• Support for LLVM 3.8 and preliminary support for LLVM 3.9 (new)

Bug fixes:

• 0.16.0-beta1: Trivial program fails on FreeBSD. (#1119) (new)
• x86 ABI: Fix Solaris regression and work around MSVC byval alignment issue. (#1230)
• Atomic RMW operations emit subpar x86 assembly. (#1195)
• align() not respected for local variable declarations. (#1154)
• Codegen optimizations are no longer disabled when -g is given. (75b3270)
• Debug information is now generated for ref and out parameters. (#1177)
• core.internal.convert tests do not depend on real padding bytes any longer. (#788)

Building LDC:

• LDC now requires LLVM 3.5–3.8 and thus also a C++11-capable compiler to build.

Internals:

• The LDC-specific parts of the source code have received a big overhaul to make use of some C++11 features and to unify the style (the LLVM style as per clang-format is now used).
• The groundwork for a code generation test suite working on the LLVM IR level has been laid, together with some first test cases for alignment issues.
• LDC now emits more optional LLVM IR attributes for more optimization opportunities. (#1232)

Known issues:

• LDC does not zero the padding area of a real variable. This may lead to wrong results if the padding area is also considered. See #770. Does not apply to real members inside structs etc.
• Phobos does not compile on MinGW platform.

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