On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 13:11:11 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
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
OK, a shared front end will be great!
My main concern is that if they are not integrated withing the
daily pull-merge-auto-test loop they will always tend to drift
and get out of sync while trying to fix stuff that breaks.
If the author of the pull request gets auto feedback from DMD and
LDC on hes changes test results, than he will be aware of
potential problems he might create.
The integration doesn't necessarily needs to be tightly coupled,
i.e. LDC can keep its infrastructure and auto sync/run any merges
from mainline. The issue is what to do with breaking changes.
Ideally, no breaking should be allowed for when fixing
regressions or bugs, and any breaking on front-end or glue layers
should at least be talked with the LDC/GDC guys.
All of the above needs steering from the leadership to follow
trough.
And BTW, I'm happy with what D has become :), always room for
improvements, thank you!
