On 2012-05-21 21:48, Andrew Wiley wrote:
Gee, thanks for your enthusiastic support for GSOC projects that will
greatly forward the D ecosystem.
Ultimately, what's useful to the D community (for reasons discussed in
these NGs many times over) is that we have working, mature, feature-rich
IDEs. The languages they're implemented in are mostly irrelevant, and in
MonoDevelop's case, trying to add language support via a plugin written
in D to an IDE written in C# would be silly. Would you extend Eclipse in
C++? It just doesn't make any sense at all.
I see no reason why the compiler can't be implemented in D and have a C
interface.
What's more, building tools for D in languages other than D can be
extremely useful. Every time a discussion for a D compiler written in D
comes up, no one really likes to mention the benefits we've gotten from
having a compiler written in C++:
Again as above.
- there are no bootstrapping problems because C++ exists on basically
every platform D would ever want to target
Provide a C backend.
- GDC and LDC were built without reimplementing the entire compiler
and exist on platforms DMD doesn't support
Just provide a C interface.
- GDC can be formally added to GCC without the aforementioned
reimplementation of the compiler
That's a good point. I actually don't know what they would think about that.
There's no shame in building off solid technologies, even if those
technologies have no direct link to the D ecosystem. Building IDEs in D
does demonstrate that D is powerful and useful, but except for Rainer
Schuetze and Visual D (which actually /is/ written in D), D has not been
the right tool for the job for reasons that have little to do with the
language's actual merits.
The response at this point is generally, "Why build off
MonoDevelop/Eclipse/VisualStudio when you could build from scratch?" and
again, the question is whether building from scratch makes sense.
Existing frameworks exist, are very powerful, are already familiar to
many developers, and are generally easier to build on. There's certainly
nothing stopping anyone from working from scratch, but building from an
existing framework will get faster results and all the aforementioned
benefits. If the heap of abandoned incomplete IDE-from-scratch projects
on DSource says anything, it says that fast results are important in
community-driven projects.
I, for one, look forward to seeing what Alex can build this summer. Best
of luck as you start your project.
Andrew
I agree.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
