On 2/26/16 7:02 AM, Radu wrote:
On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 11:01:46 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I don't see anything unfair. gdc, ldc, and dmd are each as good as
their respective teams make them.
The lack of fairness comes from the way the ecosystem is setup, you have
the reference compiler released, then everybody needs to catch up with
it. Why not have others be part of the official release? This will
undoubtedly increase the quality of the frontend and the glue layer, and
probably the runtime, just because they will be tested on more
architectures each release.
No matter how you put it, both LDC and GDC are limited in manpower, and
also caught in the merge game with mainline. This is a bottle neck if
they need to attract more talent. Right of the bat you need to do a lot
of grunt work handling different repos, each at their own revision, plus
all the knowledge about build env and testing env.
The issue here is the front-end not the back end. Daniel has already
stated this was a goal (to make the front end shared code). So it will
happen (I think Daniel has a pretty good record of following through, we
do have a D-based front end now after all).
Any effort to make both LDC and GDC part of the "official" release would
be artificial -- instead of LDC and GDC getting released "faster", they
would simply hold up dmd's release until they caught up. And this is
probably more pressure than their developers need.
When the front end is shared, then the releases will be quicker, and you
can be happier with it.
-Steve
