GDTk

Installing the LLVM D Compiler

You need a D compiler to build gdtk from source and we recommend the LLVM D compiler. If you have some linux chops, the install process is quite straightforward:

  • Download the latest stable release (unless on a system with an old glibc – see IMPORTANT note below) from: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases (Look under Assets and grab the linux-x86_64 build.)
  • Unpack in an area of your choosing.
  • Set your PATH variable so that it can find the binaries in the bin/ subdirectory of what you just unpacked.

IMPORTANT: Use version 1.26.0 of the ldc2 on systems with an older glibc. You will know if this applies if you get a glibc error at compile time. Read more in this FAQ note.

For those newer to linux, read on for a step-by-step walk through. Advanced users might just skip to the bottom step about configuring your environment to use the loadable library.

Step-by-step walk through for installing the LDC compiler

For this example, I will install version ldc-1.26.0. You may find a newer stable release when you visit the ldc relesease webpage. You will need to look under the Assets drop-down and choose the architecture: linux-x86_64. You should download that newest release. There is a caveat to the advice of downloading the newest release: if you are on a system with an old glibc, then stick to version 1.26. More on that in the FAQ entry.

IMPORTANT: Use version 1.26.0 of the ldc2 on systems with an older glibc. You will know if this applies if you get a glibc error at compile time. Read more in this FAQ note.

For most of this you will work in a terminal. The first step involves the browser to find a package to download.

  1. Go to the LDC project github page ( https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases ), scroll down to find the latest stable release. (Note: sometimes a pre-release is listed first. Skip this. Go for a stable release.)

  2. Download the binary package for x86_64 linux. It will have the form: ldc2-X.YY.Z-linux-x86_64.tar.xz. For this example, I downloaded: ldc2-1.26.0-linux-x86_64.tar.xz. I’ll assume this has landed in your Downloads folder.

    This file is what we call a compressed tarball. The tarball refers to the fact that all of the files in this package have been grouped together into one file. The compressed part means that tarball has been modified with a compression program. In this case, the xz compression program was used.

    For the remainder of these steps, open a terminal.

  3. Copy the compressed tarball to an area for installation. I like to use an opt/ directory for extra programs that I install by hand in this manner. The following are terminal commands you can type:

     cd
 mkdir -p opt/ldc2

  4. Now unpack the compressed tarball.

     tar -Jxvf Downloads/ldc2-1.26.0-linux-x86_64.tar.xz -C opt/ldc2 --strip-components=1

    You will see it print a list of all the files that have been unpacked.

    This command has actually done two steps in one: decompressed the file and extracted the files from the large archive file. The tar command is responsible for the extraction, and we gave it the hint to do the decompression first with the -J flag.

    There are in fact four flags we used here: J, x, v, and f. They were grouped together and passed as one to the command by prepending the dash, ie. -Jxvf. The J is used to tell tar to outsource the decompression to the xz program. The x tells tar to do extraction. The v asks the command to be a little verbose and tell us what it’s doing. Without that flag, the command still works, but you would see no output on your screen. The f tells tar to work on a file. This might seem odd – don’t we always work on files? Well, tar stands for tape archive. It was written in the days of computers when files were archived onto tape. To this day, tar’s default action will be to try to put things onto tape, and read from tape. So you will very very often see the -f flag in usage on modern computers since we are often working with files on local disk.

    We controlled the destination for the unpacking with the -C option. Also, the --strip-components=1 removed the leading directory provided in the tarball. This means that our compiler install is sitting directly under opt/ldc2.

  5. Set your PATH variable so that it finds the LDC binaries.

    To do this, I add a line to my .bashrc file, which is a hidden file sitting in my home directory. On a Debian-based system, the preferred place for modifications is in the file .bash_aliases. If you are using Ubuntu or Mint Linux, then you are using a Debian-based system. You will need to open an editor to make the addition to that file. Let’s try gedit in this example, but any editor will do.

     cd
 gedit .bashrc

    Now add a line at the end of the file.

     export PATH=${PATH}:${HOME}/opt/ldc2/bin

    The PATH variable is what we call an environment variable. It configures a particular aspect of your working environment. This particular variable tells the compute which directories of all the many directories on your hard drive to search when looking for binaries. This is an efficiency measure. If the computer searched every directory every time you typed a command, the response time on commands would be very slow. Instead, we configure the PATH variable so that it only contains a very small subset of all the total directories to search. This speeds up enormously the search for commands when we type them at the command prompt.

    Note that we appended the new search directory to what was already set in PATH. We did that with the expression ${PATH}:${HOME}/opt/ldc2/bin. This is important. Using the append expression, we preserve the system default PATH search directories. If we were to override that, we would lose access to basic commands and programs on our system, all the things we think of as system defaults.

  6. Changes to your .bashrc file do not take immediate effect in this session. To have your .bashrc file re-processed, do:

     cd
 . .bashrc

    Look at that second command carefully. It is strange at first glance. It is a dot followed by a space followed by the filename .bashrc. It is an instruction to process what appears in .bashrc.

For advanced users of the loadable library

If you are using the loadable library, then you will also need to configure your LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Again make the appropriate change in .bashrc or equivalent:

    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:${HOME}/opt/ldc2/lib