ldc-developers/ldc v1.21.0-beta1

LDC 1.21.0-beta1

on GitHub

Big news

• Frontend, druntime and Phobos are at version 2.091.0, incl. new CLI switches -verror-style and -HC, -HCd, -HCf. (#3333)
• iOS (incl. watchOS and tvOS) support has landed in druntime and Phobos (thanks Jacob!). All unittests are green on iOS/arm64. The prebuilt macOS package includes prebuilt druntime & Phobos libraries for iOS/arm64, for first -mtriple=arm64-apple-ios12.0 cross-compilation experiments. (#3373)
• LLVM for prebuilt packages upgraded to v10.0.0-rc4. Android NDK version bumped to r21. (#3307)
• Initial support for GCC/GDC-style inline assembly syntax, besides DMD-style inline asm and LDC-specific __asm, enabling to write inline asm that is portable across GDC/LDC and corresponds to the GCC syntax in C. See ldc-developers/druntime#171 for examples wrt. how to transition from __asm to similar GCC-style asm. (#3304)
• Inline assembly diagnostics have been extended by the D source location. (#3339)
• Android: Revamped druntime initialization, fixing related issues for i686/x86_64 targets, enabling the usage of the ld.gold linker (bfd isn't required anymore) as well as getting rid of the D main() requirement. (#3350, #3357, ldc-developers/druntime#178)

Platform support

• Supports LLVM 3.9 - 10.0.

Bug fixes

• Fixed tail calls in thunks, affecting AArch64 (the debug libraries now work) and possibly other architectures. (#3329, #3332)
• Windows: Do not leak MSVC-environment-setup into -run child processes. A new LDC_VSDIR_FORCE environment variable can be used to enforce MSVC toolchain setup. (#3340, #3341)
• Windows: Fix memory leak when throwing exceptions in threads. (#3369, ldc-developers/druntime#181)

Internals

• WebAssembly: Switch from legacy linked-list ModuleInfo registry to __minfo section. (#3348)
• Windows: Switch to wide wmain C entry point in druntime. (#3351)

Known issues

• NEW: When building LDC, old LDC 0.17.*/ltsmaster host compilers miscompile LDC ≥ 1.21, leading to potential segfaults of the built LDC. It can still be used to bootstrap a first compiler and then let that compiler compile itself. (#3354)
• Buggy older ld.bfd linker versions may wrongly strip out required symbols, e.g., ModuleInfos (so that e.g. no module ctors/dtors are run). LDC defaults to ld.gold on Linux.
• 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.