Hi all,
I am excited to share news about two changes that recently made
their way into the development version of LDC, changes that might
be interesting for many of you Linux users out there.
The first is that LDC now supports linker-level dead code
elimination on Linux. If you happen to be familiar with the
-f{function,data}-sections/--gc-sections options of the GNU
toolchain, their equivalent is now enabled by default. For a set
of small-ish programs that make use of different parts of Phobos,
I've seen executable size improvements of close to 4x (!) in my
tests. However, as --gc-sections is known to occasionally cause
trouble with third-party code that relies on specific linker
behavior, this optimization can be disabled with a new LDC
switch, -disable-linker-strip-dead.
And secondly, proper support for building druntime/Phobos as
shared libraries and loading D shared objects dynamically has now
arrived in LDC! As you might be aware, Martin Nowak has spent a
considerable amount of effort on adding runtime loading
capabilities to DMD and druntime during the last year or so. LDC
now offers the same level of functionality, to a good part based
on Martin's solid work. To build a copy of LDC with
druntime/Phobos as a shared library, which is also required for
proper runtime loading, simply pass -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON to
CMake. Oh, and for now this is Linux-only too, sorry.
Even though I am currently not aware of any remaining issues,
there are likely a few rough edges still. To be able to
confidently ship these features as part of the next release, we'd
very much appreciate early feedback. Just grab LDC from Git
master and let us know how things went over on digitalmars.D.ldc.
If you run into a specific bug, you can also directly open a
ticket at https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues.
Cheers,
David
- For the adventurous: News from t... David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d
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