LDC contributor's guide

This page is a work-in-progress collection of tips for LDC contributors and development guidelines.

Continuous Integration

The LDC project uses two different CI systems: Travis CI, which does Ubuntu x86 + OS X builds, and AppVeyor, which does Windows builds. Both test LDC's branches and test pull requests too.

Any efforts to get regular builds+tests on other platforms would be very much appreciated (especially non-x86 platforms, like ARM, PowerPC, ...).

To run the test suite locally, use ctest (e.g. ctest -j3 --output-on-failure) in the CMake root directory. To work on a specific test case, you might want to look into the -R and --verbose options to ctest.

Style guidelines

Generally, use your good taste and try to use a style similar to the surrounding code. Many parts of the LLVM Coding Standards are directly applicable to LDC as well.

Formatting, etc.

• Use clang-format with the LLVM style for formatting.
• Use include guards consistently, in the format LDC_<dir>_<filename>, e.g. LDC_GEN_DVALUE_H.
• Includes are placed at the top of the file, sorted lexicographically and grouped in the following order:
  1. Main include corresponding to the .cpp file, if any.
  2. DMD and other LDC includes.
  3. LLVM/libconfig includes.
  4. System includes.

APIs and idioms

• Avoid making changes to the front end sources (dmd and dmd2) as much as reasonably possible. If modifications are necessary, be sure to enclose the deviations from the upstream source #if IN_LLVM blocks, and keep the original source code around for easier comparison. Add a comment referring to the relevant issue on our tracker, or the upstream DMD commit in case of a straight backport. This makes it much easier to resolve any merge conflicts when folding in new frontend releases.
• Use llvm_unreachable("message") instead of assert(0 && "message") (from llvm/Support/ErrorHandling.h). Not only might it lead to slightly better codegen, it also prevents »variable might be used uninitialized« and similar compiler warnings.

Merging a new DMD release

Eventually, we will want to write up a checklist of what to consider when merging a new frontend release. Right now, just a few points to consider:

• Check if there were any new command line options added to DMD. if so, also handle them in LDMD.

Updating the dmd-testsuite repository

The dmd-testsuite repository is derived from the upstream DMD repository by the update-dmd-testsuite.sh script in the ldc-scripts repository. Just run it without arguments, and it should update the repository with the latest commits/tags (given that you have Git installed and an SSH key configured for github.com). The changes should apply to the remote repository in a fast-forward fashion, never force a push.

After this is done, when merging a new DMD frontend release, just merge the v2.<xyz> tag into the ldc branch, manually resolving any merge conflicts as necessary (most changes should definitely be upstreamed).

Releasing a new version of LDC

There is a separate page describing the LDC release process: How to release LDC.