On Thursday, 19 February 2015 at 08:46:11 UTC, Mayuresh Kathe
wrote:
Should I choose DMD or go with GDC?
I work with projects whose code is half written in C, half
written in D. I use GNU make to build them. I found out that
using GDC was a much better choice for several reasons:
- project portability 1: under Windows, dmd generates OMF object
files that can't be linked by the gcc linker, while gdc generates
COFF objet files. Which means:
- I can use the same Makefile regardless of the target OS.
- I can link mingw-compiled C code with D code.
- I avoid the struggle of finding OMF versions of "SDL.lib",
"advapi32.lib", etc.
- project portability 2: stupid detail, but the weird dmd way of
specifying the output file in the command line ( "dmd
-ofmyfile.o" ) defeats the heuristics of MSYS2 path conversion.
That's a dealbreaker for me.
- when I'm running Debian/Ubuntu, the simple ability to natively
run "apt-get install gdc" to install/upgrade is very practical.
As dmd's compilation speed is blazingly fast, it remains a cool
way of writing automation scripts (#!/bin/usr/env rdmd), much
better, in my opinion, than Bash, or even Python.
