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 (and a Windows installer) for common platforms (incl. Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD and Android) are available at the GitHub release page. For Windows, the Visual D installer also comes with a bundled LDC.

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 these official packages from GitHub:

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

In addition, LDC is available from various package managers (but note that these packages are community-maintained, might be outdated and not offer the full feature set of official packages from GitHub):

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 recent LLVM version (≥ 11) available, there should be no big surprises. Do not forget to make sure the Phobos submodule is up to date:

$ cd ldc
$ git submodule update --init

(DMD, GDC and LDC are supported as host compilers. For bootstrapping purposes, we recommend GDC via its gdmd wrapper.)

Cross-compilation

Similar to other LLVM-based compilers, cross-compiling with LDC is simple. Full instructions and example invocations are provided on the dedicated Wiki page.

Targeting Android

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

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!