ldc-developers/ldc v1.12.0-beta2

LDC 1.12.0-beta2

on GitHub

(Changes since 1.12.0-beta1 are marked with (new).)

Big news

• Frontend, druntime and Phobos are at version 2.082.0+. (#2818, #2837, #2858) (new)
  • Significant performance improvements for some transcendental std.math functions in single and double precision, at least for x86. (dlang/phobos#6272 (comment))
• Support for LLVM 7, which is used for the prebuilt packages. Due to an LLVM 7.0.0 regression, the prebuilt x86[_64] LDC binaries require a CPU with SSSE3, and so will your optimized binaries (unless compiling with -mattr=-ssse3). (#2850) (new)
• JIT compilation: new ldc.dynamic_compile.bind function with interface similar to C++ std::bind, allowing to generate efficient specialized versions of functions (much like Easy::jit for C++). (#2726) (new)
• LTO now basically working for Win64 too; the prebuilt package includes the required external LLD linker and the optional LTO default libs. Enable as usual with -flto=<thin|full> [-defaultlib=druntime-ldc-lto,phobos2-ldc-lto]. (#2774)
• Config file: new lib-dirs array for directories to be searched for libraries, incl. LLVM compiler-rt libraries. (#2790)

Platform support

• Supports LLVM 3.7 - 7.0. (new)
• Windows: Supports Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools 2015 and 2017.
• Android: Native ARM packages for the Termux app are included, install one like this: dpkg -i ldc-beta_1.12.0_android-aarch64.deb. Cross-compiling to Android is temporarily broken with this beta2 release- the desktop, ie Win/Mac/linux, beta2 builds require passing the flag -emulated-tls=false when cross-compiling any D code to Android- so use an older desktop build until it's fixed in the final 1.12 release.

Bug fixes

• Fix IR-based PGO on Windows (requires our LLVM fork). (#2539)
• Fix C++ class construction with D new on Posix. (#2801)
• Android: No more text relocations in Phobos zlib, required for API level 23+. (#2822, #2835)
• Declare extern const/immutable globals as IR constants. (#2849, #2852) (new)
• Fix issue when emitting both object and textual assembly files at once (-output-o -output-s). (#2847) (new)
• Support address of struct member as key/value in AA literal. (#2859, #2860) (new)

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.