The D language front-end support finally merged into GCC 9

2 min read

The D Language front-end got finally merged into GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 9, yesterday, as reported by Phoronix. The D language front-end is written in C++ and it supports the D 2.0 run-time and shared libraries.

Iain Buclaw in his e-mail thread titled ‘Submission of D Front End’ says, “The front-end is split into two parts. First being a standalone D language implementation that does the source file lexing, parsing and semantic analysis. Second being the binding layer that sits between GCC and the DMD front-end, doing the actual code generation.”

Approval on the plan for merging D language front-end into GCC 9

According to a report by Phoronix, last year in June, the GCC Steering Committee had approved the plan of adding the D front-end. However, it took the project more than a year as a set of 13 patches of code, which is nearly 800k lines of code was worked upon and which had undergone revisions for getting the code in adequate shape for merging.

Iain Buclaw from the GDC project took the initiative of posting these patches after carefully cleaning them up and also addressing the feedback he had received before. The patch series is available on GCC-patches.

Updates on the future plan

As per a report by Phoronix, Richard Biener of SUSE announced on 17th October that GCC’s “stage 1” development will shift to “stage 3” on 11 November. It’s clear that the open feature development is over and the focus is now on bug-fixing. 6 January 2019 is the tentative date, to begin with the fixes.

GCC 9.1, the initial GCC9 stable compiler release with GDC support is expected to be out around the end of the first quarter of 2019.

Read more about this news on the official site of Phoronix.