On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 00:35:01 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 22:57:20 +0000, Márcio Martins wrote:
I was reading the other thread "Speed kills" and was wondering
if there is any practical reason why DMD is the official
compiler?
Walter Bright is the lead developer, and for legal reasons he
will never touch source code from a compiler he didn't write.
And since DMD is something like twice as fast as LDC, there's
at least some argument in favor of keeping it around.
Should Walter retire, there's a reasonable chance that LDC will
become the primary compiler. However, compilation speed is
important.
I'm not sure how different LDC and DMD are, but perhaps you
could use DMD for development and LDC for production builds?
Hmm, I think most of us involved with D for a while know which
compiler to use and why, right?
But would it be beneficial to D as a language if we could make it
so that the first compiler a newcomer interacts with, will be the
one that produces code as fast as C/C++?
Walter and everyone else could continue working on DMD as the
reference compiler and pushing language features. Everyone that
uses DMD could continue using it. Nothing would have to change,
except for the website, and perhaps some work on building
installers for LDC and GDC to also a "Easy installation"
description on the downloads section :)
Purely a marketing move, if that makes sense, I don't know...
