On Monday, 13 July 2026 at 18:14:34 UTC, Brian Callahan wrote:
Hi all —
In case it is useful to anyone else, I documented how I
bootstrapped GDC with DMD, with a freely available tool so that
you can too.
https://briancallahan.net/blog/20260713.html
~Brian
Thanks for the write-up.
The GCC ports for Darwin (also PPC) and Solaris (x86 and SPARC)
regularly(-ish?) test bootstrapping the current mainline version
of D with the oldest supported version of GDC - there's a reason
why it says 9.4, and not 9.x.
[Darwin is a bit more involved as they test bootstrap from
apple-gcc 4.2 -> gcc 17.x, with all the odd jumps in between for
Ada, C++, and D]
You are correct that there's nothing preventing the use of
another D compiler to bootstrap GDC. So long as it can create a
static executable, it will do.
For the sake of comparing notes, I did put out a little
proof-of-concept gist around the time of the 12.1 release, as at
least one distro packager asked at the time.
dmd:
https://gist.github.com/ibuclaw/73f91fd66b5d4a1a6ad29d739be627c1
ldc:
https://gist.github.com/ibuclaw/e6733142a8644ffb53106cc9986372fa
Iain.
