On Friday, 1 July 2016 at 00:08:51 UTC, dalailambda wrote:
On Thursday, 30 June 2016 at 23:48:29 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
DMD *is* the official compiler. That's what a reference
compiler is. The other compilers are there for those who want
them and are developed independently of DMD. It's no different
from the situation with Java (with the exception that Oracle
doesn't link to other compilers on their JDK download page).
No one says you *have* to use LDC or GDC for production, or
that you can't use DMD. It's just as a recommendation for
those who care about squeezing out every last drop of
performance.
Sure, but overwhelmingly the community suggests to use DMD for
development for fast compilation speeds and then use LDC/GDC
for production. I'm not saying that the law mandates it but the
impression I get as a newcommer to the community is that DMD is
the ugly stepchild that isn't suitable for real world use case.
As an example, look at whenever a benchmark comes up, someone
will say "have you tried compiling with LDC?". I feel the is
relevant since, as a systems language, performance should be a
feature.
It's been suggested that DMD/LDC/GDC could be combined into a
bundle, say DCC, and when you call
DCC hello.d
it will call dmd hello.d,
and if you call
DCC -fast hello.d
it will call ldc hello.d or gdc hello.d
This will give newcomers a different experience.