It’s two days that i’m spending time in my passion. The D programming language.

Well, from two months a new compiler is raising in the community talks. This compiler is ldc, is based on llvm and from the dmd frontend which is used as a main frontend to implement the D specifications.

As i said some time ago, one of the things that makes D incomplete is a full free software compiler. Well. Ldc could be the answer. I started packaging ldc for debian and ubuntu creating a branch or revision 1179 from the ldc hg repository. As a standard library i used tango at its early release 0.99.8. The sources of my work are on launchpad.net and they include a full working tree, already with a debian directory in it.

There are still some things to fix which i’ve reported to the d-language-packagers group with the above mail:

Hi.

In these days i worked in packaging ldc.

In the launchpad bzr of the group you can already find a revision which
compiles quite good. This is the content of the package:

goshawk@earth:~/Documents/Projects/MOTU/ldc/d1$ dpkg -c  ldc_0.9-1_amd64.deb
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2009-03-30 20:35 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/sbin/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/bin/
-rwxr-xr-x root/root       721 2009-03-30 20:32 ./usr/bin/ldc.conf
-rwxr-xr-x root/root       305 2009-03-30 20:32 ./usr/bin/ldc.rebuild.conf
-rwxr-xr-x root/root  12266952 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/bin/ldc
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/lib/
-rw-r–r– root/root    742780 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/lib/libtango-base-ldc.a
-rw-r–r– root/root   7084206 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/lib/libtango-user-ldc.a
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/share/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/share/doc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2009-03-30 20:35 ./usr/share/doc/ldc/
-rw-r–r– root/root       279 2009-03-30 02:33 ./usr/share/doc/ldc/readme.txt
-rw-r–r– root/root      2304 2009-03-30 02:33
./usr/share/doc/ldc/CMakeLists.txt.gz
-rw-r–r– root/root     14815 2009-03-30 02:07 ./usr/share/doc/ldc/copyright
-rw-r–r– root/root       154 2009-03-30 17:56
./usr/share/doc/ldc/changelog.Debian.gz

As you can see, all the .conf should be moved in /etc/.  Arthur, do you think
that putting them in /etc/ldc/ is the better choice?

What’s missed to make ldc working away from the building environment is
explained by the ldc config file:

default:
{
// ‘switches’ holds array of string that are appends to the command line
// arguments before they are parsed.
switches = [
“-I/home/goshawk/Documents/Projects/MOTU/ldc/d1/ldc-0.9/obj-x86_64-
linux-gnu/runtime/../tango”,
“-I/home/goshawk/Documents/Projects/MOTU/ldc/d1/ldc-0.9/obj-x86_64-
linux-gnu/runtime/../tango/lib/common”,
“-L-L/usr/lib”,
“-d-version=Tango”,
“-defaultlib=tango-base-ldc”,
“-L-ltango-user-ldc”,
“-debuglib=tango-base-ldc”
];
};

The missing point is the tango library that should be compiled for ldc IMHO.
I think that the best solution is to provide a libtango-ldc and libtango-ldc-
dev package to contain the .a and the .di files used by ldc.

Any comment or suggestions about it?

Best Regards.

See you.

If you have any suggestion about it, just comment on this post 🙂

Let’s see what happens in the next days, if you want to contribute, join the the d-language-packagers group and send me a comment! 🙂