On Friday, 19 February 2016 at 09:06:28 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
Walter has stated previously that there have been cases of
lawyers coming to him about him possibly violating someone
else's copyright, and when he tells them that he's never even
looked at the source code, that satisfies them. And when the
GPL is involved, that' paranoia is probably a very good idea.
If FSF lawyers contact you without solid reason then it is
newsworthy and should make headlines. So I sincerely doubt that
anyone from FSF has done so.
Some lawyers are trying to make a living out of acting like
manipulative bastards, randomly fishing for a case, hoping you
will put something in writing that they can twist. Does not mean
they have a leg to stand on, just don't admit anything to them in
writing.
you're not. And while the LLVM license would definitely allow
LLVM code to be mixed into dmd's backend as long as the
Well, that would be silly anyway. IMO the better approach would
be to create a high level typed IR and have a clean
non-optimizing backend (or JIT). Then leave the optimized backend
for LLVM.
Basically clean up the source code and introduce a clean separate
layer between the templating system and codegen.
That way more people could work on it. Make it easy to work on
one aspect of the compiler without understanding the whole.
Regardless, whether Walter is willing to look at LLVM/LDC or
work on it at all is up to him.
Sure. It is better to have a very simple backend for an
experimental/reference compiler.
But DMDs backend isn't simpler to understand than LLVM.
If it was dead simple and made the compiler easier to understand,
then it would be good to have it in.
