[Scons-dev] Note on Issue 1924, SCons and D

[Russel Winder]

Sorry to have been away from SCons, I probably can't come back to
anything till after October.

I am getting some issue notifications and spotted that William is
fixing the D imports issue. Thanks for taking that on. Even with the
rise of Dub as a package management and build tool in the D milieu,
CMake and SCons still have a role, so it is important to be up to date
with the language specification. 

There is some effort to get a D plugin to IntelliJ IDEA, but that will
be Dub based. To get D support for CLion requires the CMake support.
 JetBrains are not keen on supporting SCons since they have CMake and
Gradle – and Gradle now does C++ builds.

The core point prompting the email is though just to clarify the issue
of DMD, GDC and LDC.

DMD is the mainline and reference implementation but it has a weird
licence for part of it and so Debian and Fedora do not package it.
Whilst it compiles very quickly and produced good code, it is not the
best generated code. GDC sits in the GCC and so targets anything GCC
does with excellent optimization, but the front end version is now
quite old in comparison to DMD and LDC. LDC sits atop LLVM and has
relatively up-to-date front end and an excellent back end (obviously :-
). For many (including me) LDC is the production compiler of choice.

Sadly GDC and LDC packages on Debian (Fedora do not package GDC) are
set up to use the same location for all the module sources. Given that
GDC and LDC are different D versions this is untenable. This means it
is not sensible to try and install both GDC and LDC onto the same
machine using package management, at least on Debian. The Fedora LDC
package is so old it is embarrassing for the Fedora packagers.
  
The upshot of this is that for testing only GDC and LDC can be tested
without adding extra package sources (d-apt for Debian, or use Arch),
and that, at least on Debian, only one of GDC or LDC can be installed
at any one time – not sure about Arch. The MacPorts situation is
difficult, not sure about Homebrew. Windows is always a problem, I am
not sure Chocolatey has caught up, though it is getting traction.


-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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