== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article > Abandoning dmd's back end now then would entail a 2 year delay with no > updates, and I guarantee that there'll be years of wringing bugs out of > LLVM. Writing a cg for a complex instruction set like the x86 is, well, > pretty complicated <g> with thousands of special cases. > One thing that made D possible was I was able to use a mature, > professional quality, debugged optimizer and back end. The lack of that > has killed many otherwise promising languages in the past.
I do agree to a large extent with the argument that Walter's time is better spent on the language itself rather than on messing with compiler back ends, but just to play devil's advocate: What happens when x86-32 is irrelevant because everyone's using 64-bit? Could DMD eventually be made to support x86-64 codegen w/o too much work, given that it already supports x86-32? How much longer do others on this newsgroup think x86-32 will be the dominant compiler target?
