On 18 February 2016 at 11:42, Márcio Martins via Digitalmars-d < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 10:16:40 UTC, Radu wrote: > >> 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? >>> >> >> Walter should not need to ever work on D compiler back-ends, there are *a >> lot* of issues to be dealt with in the language implementation that are >> front-end only or at least not backend related. There are others that can >> work/already work with the LLVM backend and they seam to know what they are >> doing. >> >> There warts and issues in the language/runtime/phobos are well know, >> spending time fixing them is more valuable for the community rather than >> having Walter (maybe others) working on any dmd backend stuff. >> >> As rsw0x suggested, a push to get LDC on sync with mainline, and >> switching to it after it would make more sense in the long run. Probably >> focusing on LDC and investing more man power will also help fix any perf >> issues re. compile time, there should bot be much to loose here at least >> for debug compile times. >> >> All this of course depends on Walter's willing to give up working on DMD, >> whatever this means for him. >> > > Walter doesn't have to give up working on DMD, right? Everyone could > continue working on DMD, perhaps a few people could help on all three, I > don't know... It's important if more people work on DMD and focus on > polishing the frontend and language features, being the reference compiler, > and used by all three compilers as well. What could potentially be > important would be to backport key fixes/features from current frontend to > LDC/GDC as well. > There seems to be a deterrence against backporting ie: 2.068 fixes to 2.066 for LDC/GDC. I have no idea why, I do it all the time. :-)
