LDC – the LLVM-based D Compiler

The LDC project provides a portable D programming language compiler with modern optimization and code generation capabilities.

The compiler uses the official DMD frontend to support the latest version of D2, and relies on the LLVM Core libraries for code generation.

LDC is fully Open Source; the parts of the code not taken/adapted from other projects are BSD-licensed (see the LICENSE file for details).

Please consult the D wiki for further information: https://wiki.dlang.org/LDC

D1 is no longer available; see the d1 Git branch for the last version supporting it.

Installation

From a pre-built package

Linux and OS X

For several platforms, there are stand-alone binary builds available at the GitHub release page.

For bleeding-edge users, we also provide the latest successful Continuous Integration builds with enabled LLVM & LDC assertions (significantly increasing compile times).

The dlang.org install script can also be used to install LDC:

curl -fsS https://dlang.org/install.sh | bash -s ldc

In addition, LDC is available from various package managers:

	Command
Arch Linux	pacman -S ldc
Debian	apt install ldc
Fedora	dnf install ldc
Gentoo	layman -a ldc
Homebrew	brew install ldc
Ubuntu	apt install ldc
Snap	snap install --classic --channel=edge ldc2
Nix/NixOS	nix-env -i ldc
Chocolatey	choco ldc
Docker	docker pull dlanguage/ldc

Note that these packages might be outdated as they are not currently integrated into the project release process.

Windows

The latest official releases can be downloaded from the GitHub release page.

For bleeding-edge users, we also provide the latest successful Continuous Integration builds with enabled LLVM & LDC assertions (significantly increasing compile times).

LDC for Windows relies on the Microsoft linker and runtime libraries, which can be obtained by either installing Visual Studio 2015 or 2017 with Visual C++, or the stand-alone Visual C++ Build Tools.

Building from source

In-depth material on building and installing LDC and the standard libraries is available on the project wiki for Linux and macOS and Windows.

If you have a working C++/D build environment, CMake, and a current LLVM version (≥ 3.7) available, there should be no big surprises. Do not forget to make sure all the submodules (druntime, phobos, dmd-testsuite) are up to date:

$ cd ldc
$ git submodule update --init

(DMD and LDC are supported as host compilers. For bootstrapping purposes, LDC 0.17, the last version not to require a D compiler, is maintained in the ltsmaster branch).

Contact

The best way to get in touch with the developers is either via the digitalmars.D.ldc forum/newsgroup/mailing list or our Gitter chat. There is also the #ldc IRC channel on FreeNode.

For further documentation, contributor information, etc. please see the D wiki.

Feedback of any kind is very much appreciated!