On Monday, 13 March 2017 at 11:06:53 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
It is a shame that dmd and ldc do not just use the standard GCC option set.
Totally agreed.
Moreover, funny stuff like "dmd -of<Target>" (instead of standard "-o <target>") breaks automatic Msys path conversion hack (the code translates Unix paths from the command line to Windows paths before the invocation of a non-msys program), which makes it impossible to use dmd under Msys without wrapping it first.
pkg-config also is a real pain to use with dmd (the pkg-config's output needs to be post-processed so it has the form "-L-lstuff" instead of "-lstuff").
This is an issue, because it makes it very hard to use write portable makefiles for programs containing D code. Too bad, because the D code is actually platform-independent, and there's been a lot of work in Phobos to make it easy to write such code.
D was designed to be binary compatible with the C ABI ; however, having a compiler whose command-line behaves so different from gcc makes it harder to actually work with existing C libs.
This is actually the main reason why I almost exclusively use gdc: to have one Makefile, for all platforms, allowing native and cross-compilation with no platform-specific special cases.
