ldc-developers/ldc v1.13.0

LDC 1.13.0

on GitHub

(Changes since 1.13.0-beta2 are marked with (new).)

Big news

• Frontend, druntime and Phobos are at version 2.083.1. (#2878, #2893, #2920, #2933) (new)
• The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore, as we now ship with MinGW-w64-based libraries, similar to DMD. Check out the included README.txt for all relevant details. (dlang/installer#346, #2886, Wiki: Cross-compiling with LDC)
• Debug info improvements:
  • For GDB: printing global and imported symbols, non-member and member function calls. (#2826)
  • For Visual Studio and mago: names, by-value params, nested variables. (#2895, #2908, #2909, #2912)
  • Associative arrays now showing up properly (at least with mago), not as opaque void* anymore. (#2869)
  • -gc now translates D names to C++ ones, e.g., to use the regular Visual Studio debugger (bypassing mago) and as preparation for VS Code debugging with Microsoft's C/C++ plug-in (screenshots). Thanks to Oleksandr for this contribution and the AA fix! (#2869)
• New command-line option -fvisibility=hidden to hide functions/globals not marked as export (for non-Windows targets), primarily to reduce the size of shared libraries. Thanks to Andrey for stepping up! (#2894, #2923)
• Dropped support for LLVM 3.7 and 3.8. (#2872)
• LLVM for prebuilt packages upgraded to v7.0.1. (new)
• Linux: now defaulting to ld.gold linker in general, not just with -flto=thin, as buggy older ld.bfd versions may wrongly strip out required symbols (change with -linker). (#2870)
• Improved support for Android/x86[_64], musl libc and FreeBSD/AArch64. (#2917, ldc-developers/druntime#146) (new)
• LDC-specific druntime: ldc.simd.inlineIR moved/renamed to ldc.llvmasm.__ir (with deprecated legacy alias). (#2931) (new)
• New CMake option COMPILE_D_MODULES_SEPARATELY builds D files in the DDMD frontend separately to reduce the time required to build LDC with many CPU cores and/or for iterative development. (#2914)

Platform support

• Supports LLVM 3.9 - 7.0.
• Alpine linux/x64: built against Musl libc to support Docker images based on the Alpine distro, requires the llvm5-libs, musl-dev, binutils-gold and gcc packages to build and link D apps and the tzdata and curl-dev packages for certain stdlib modules.
• Android: Native packages are available in the Termux app, install like this: pkg install ldc. To cross-compile from a desktop OS, see the wiki.

Bug fixes

• 32-bit Android/ARM regression introduced in v1.12. (#2892)
• Non-Windows x86_64 ABI fixes wrt. what's passed in registers, relevant for C[++] interop. (#2864)
• Some issues with beta1's newly bundled Windows libraries. (#2900, #2903)
• Alignment of scope allocated class instances. (#2919)
• Beta2's -fvisibility=hidden causing lots of linker errors. (#2922, #2923) (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.