On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 11:12:57 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
And actually, he'd risk legal problems if he did, because he
doesn't want anyone to be able to accuse him of taking code
from gcc or llvm.
That's a silly strawman, and you should know better than putting
that forward as an argument by now.
Walter is of course free to do whatever he pleases, and I would
totally understand if his reason was just that it's hard to give
something up you've worked on for a long time.
But please don't make up argument trying to rationalize whatever
personal decision somebody else made. You could literally copy
LLVM source code into your application and sell it as a
closed-source product without risking any copyright problems (if
you comply with the very modest attribution clause of the
license).
If anything, the problem is probably that the gdc and ldc folks
could use more help, but dmd and Phobos suffer from that
problem on some level as well, albeit probably not as acutely.
The problem that many of us are seeing is that D development is
unnecessarily defocussed by spreading out the effort between
three different compilers. Of course, ideally we would have
infinite manpower. A "special-case" compiler that boasts lower
compile times for x86 development would definitely be nice to
have then. But our resources aren't limitless, and as such the
question whether we can afford to maintain such a "nice to
have"-compiler is very relevant.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that there is an argument to be
made for the current situation. And, by the way, let me make very
clear that even if I argue that sticking to DMD is a strategic
mistake, this is not about personal things. I highly respect
Walter as a compiler developer and like him as a person. But
perpetuating ill-informed arguments really doesn't do this debate
any good.
— David
- Re: Official compiler David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d
-
