Change Log: 2.069.0

The DMD frontend code has been ported to D. Self-hosting the compiler allows us to benefit from D's improved productivity and modelling power.

Basic support for Objective-C classes, interfaces and instance methods. This is implemented by adding a new linkage attribute, Objective-C, and a compiler recognized UDA, @selector. The linkage attribute is to be used on a class or interface. The UDA is attached to a method. See Interfacing to Objective-C for more information.

The -property switch used to disallow calling non-properties without parentheses. The switch has not been used to build Phobos for some time now. So naturally, code that's incompatible with -property has found its way in. This means, the switch has effectively not been supported by D at large.

Since the behaviour of the -property switch was not well-liked, it's been deprecated and made to have no effect when used.

The @property attribute is not affected, and remains as a mostly cosmetic keyword. Its semantics are going to be revisited in the future.

Several improvements have been made to the backend's codegen. Parameters and stack frame set up are optimized to use SUB/MOV instead of PUSH, resulting in 30% faster code in some cases. Also, functions marked as nothrow no longer generate a BP stack frame on Windows and Linux.

Following the work released with 2.068.0 more phobos functions were rangified.

std.net.curl was changed to load curl as shared library at runtime. This simplifies the usage as it's no longer necessary to link against libcurl or to install any development libraries.

The implementation will also try to get the needed curl symbols from the executable itself. So it remains possible to link with a specific version of libcurl or with a static libcurl library.

To make this work you have to link with --export-dynamic respectively use a .DEF file on Windows (see wiki for more info on the latter).

The default tracehandler on linux and FreeBSD now parses DWARF debug info to add file names and line numbers to backtraces.

std.conv.ConvException@DPL/dmd/src/../../phobos/std/conv.d(1720): Unexpected 'a' when converting from type string to type ulong

DPL/dmd/src/../../phobos/std/conv.d:1720 pure @safe ulong std.conv.toImpl!(ulong, immutable(char)[]).toImpl(immutable(char)[]) [0x43b339]
DPL/dmd/src/../../phobos/std/conv.d:298 pure @safe ulong std.conv.to!(ulong).to!(immutable(char)[]).to(immutable(char)[]) [0x437717]
example.d:5 ulong example.foo(immutable(char)[]) [0x4376c7]
example.d:10 _Dmain [0x4376e5]
??:? _D2rt6dmain211_d_run_mainUiPPaPUAAaZiZ6runAllMFZ9__lambda1MFZv [0x444576]
??:? void rt.dmain2._d_run_main(int, char**, extern (C) int function(char[][])*).tryExec(scope void delegate()) [0x4444cc]
??:? void rt.dmain2._d_run_main(int, char**, extern (C) int function(char[][])*).runAll() [0x444532]
??:? void rt.dmain2._d_run_main(int, char**, extern (C) int function(char[][])*).tryExec(scope void delegate()) [0x4444cc]
??:? _d_run_main [0x444429]
??:? main [0x44039f]
??:? __libc_start_main [0xc3ae96ff]
    

Support for linking against the Microsoft runtime library distributed with VS 2015 has been added. This affects both the 64-bit build for Win64 and the 32-bit build targeting the MS runtime (-m32mscoff).

The compiler detects the library version to adjust the link command line automatically. If you don't use dmd for linking, make sure to add legacy_stdio_definitions.lib to your command line when linking against the VS2015 runtime.

A large portion of the functions in Phobos have improved documentation, including but not limited to spelling fixes, clarifications, better explanations of function and template parameters, and better explanations of return values.

moveEmplace efficiently combines move with emplace thus avoids having to initialize and destroy a value before moving into uninitialized data.

T* moveToHeap(T)(ref T value)
{
    import core.memory : GC;

    auto ptr = cast(T*)GC.malloc(T.sizeof);
    // move value and emplace it into ptr
    moveEmplace(value, *ptr);
    return ptr;
}

There are also moveEmplaceAll and moveEmplaceSome as counterparts of moveAll and moveSome.