Building DMD

If you're looking for a stable version of D, you probably want to download the official releases. This page is for those who want to try out D on platforms that aren't yet officially supported, those who are adventurous and wish to try out the latest development (unstable!) version of D, and developers who wish to contribute to D development.

Getting the sources

Official releases

The official release of DMD is available from the official download page.

Latest git

This is for those who want to test or contribute to the development version of D. The latest source code for the D compiler, runtime library, and standard library are available on GitHub. To build a working D compiler toolchain, you will need to checkout at least dmd, druntime, and phobos.

Source code structure

The D source code assumes a particular directory structure, which you probably would want to adopt so that you don't have to fiddle with the Makefiles all the time.

Posix

For Posix, it is assumed that you will have a common root directory where the compiler and library sources will sit under. For example, you can choose the common root directory to be /usr/src/d, then you can checkout the sources under this directory:

mkdir /usr/src/d
cd /usr/src/d
git clone git://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd.git
git clone git://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime.git
git clone git://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos.git

Note: if you're planning to submit pull requests, you should replace the above URLs with the URLs for your fork of the official sources, not the official sources themselves.

You should end up with this directory structure:

/usr/src/d/
/usr/src/d/dmd
/usr/src/d/druntime
/usr/src/d/phobos

Windows

For windows, you can follow the first posix steps regarding checking out files from github.

You can checkout the sources wherever you like. If we call %DM_HOME% the root path, the it is recommended to have this structure:

%DM_HOME%\dmd2\src
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\dmd
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\druntime
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\phobos

Additionally, you should extract the digital mars compiler inside %DM_HOME%, alongside dmd2. You should finally create a {{code|windows directory with a bin and lib directory inside it. Your final structure should look like this:

%DM_HOME%\dm
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\src
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\dmd
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\druntime
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\phobos
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\windows
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\windows\bin
%DM_HOME%\dmd2\windows\lib

Building the sources

Posix

Assuming your sources are checked out in /usr/src/d, you can do the following to build them:

cd /usr/src/d/dmd/src
make -f posix.mak
cd ../../druntime
make -f posix.mak
cd ../phobos
make -f posix.mak

Note that the compiler, runtime library, and standard library have to be built in that order, as each depends on the previous one.

If you're using a 64-bit platform, you may want to append "MODEL=64" to your make commands, as the default makefiles will build for 32-bit:

cd /usr/src/d/dmd/src
make -f posix.mak MODEL=64
cd ../../druntime
make -f posix.mak MODEL=64
cd ../phobos
make -f posix.mak MODEL=64

Parallel make can drastically speed up compilation times. The -j<integer> option allows you to specify the number of job slots. Number_of_cores + 1 is a often a good choice E.g.:

make -f posix.mak -j5

for a machine with 4 cores.

After building, you should have a working D compiler in /usr/src/d/dmd/src/dmd. You may need to edit dmd.conf so that the compiler can find druntime and phobos. (TBD: expand on this)

You should probably also run the unittests to make sure your build is working correctly:

cd ../druntime
make -f posix.mak -j5 unittest
cd ../phobos
make -f posix.mak -j5 unittest

(Running the unittests with -j is recommended if you have a multicore CPU, as some of them may take a while to run.)

Windows

The following instructions work for win32. May or may not work with win64. This scheme is a suggestion.

Assuming your sources are checked out C:\D, and that make from digital mars is in your path, you can do the following to build them:

set DM_HOME=C:\D
cd %DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\dmd\src
make -fwin32.mak -release

From there, it is suggested to move the built binaries into your %DM_HOME%\windows\bin directory, and add that to your path:

copy *.exe %DM_HOME%\dmd2\windows\bin
set path=%path%;%DM_HOME%\dmd2\windows\bin

From there, you have to create a sc.ini in your DMD.exe directory. It is suggested to just copy paste the one provided in the packaged D2·110·0, instead of writing your own.

Now build druntime:

cd %DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\druntime
make -fwin32.mak

And phobos:

cd %DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\phobos
make -fwin32.mak

You should copy the phobos lib into your windows\lib folder:

copy phobos.lib %DM_HOME%\dmd2\windows\lib

Optionally, you can build rdmd from source if you have checked out tools in your sources:

cd %DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\tools
make -fwin32.mak rdmd.exe
copy *.exe %DM_HOME%\dmd2\windows\bin

The last step is getting the additional libs. curl for D2 can be found at the bottom of the download section of dlang.org: [download].

Additional libs that are necessary can simply be copy pasted from the D2·110·0 package (without overwriting your phobos.lib)

The very last step is to verify that everything works by unittesting phobos:

cd %DM_HOME%\dmd2\src\phobos
make -fwin32.mak unittest

Common Windows issues

If when building druntime you get errors about missing MASM386, it's due to a required assembling of a file called minit.asm. However the druntime repository includes a prebuilt minit.obj file so you shouldn't need to assemble it again. As a workaround for the make error create an empty masm386.bat file and put it in a directory that's in your PATH.