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 source 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

Portable stand-alone binary builds for common platforms (incl. Linux, macOS and Windows) are available at the GitHub release page.

For bleeding-edge users, we also provide the latest successful Continuous Integration builds with enabled LLVM & LDC assertions (increasing compile times by roughly 50%).

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In addition, LDC is available from various package managers (but note that these packages might be outdated as they are not currently integrated into the project release process):

Targeting Android

You can find full instructions on cross-compiling or natively compiling for Android on the wiki.

Building from source

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

If you have a working C++/D build environment, CMake, and a current LLVM version (≥ 3.9) 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).

Cross-compiling

We've recently added a cross-compilation tool to make it easier to build the D runtime and standard library for other platforms, ldc-build-runtime. Full instructions and example invocations are provided on its wiki page.

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!