GDC release cycle

[Iain Buclaw]

On Tue, 1 Oct 2019 at 22:45, Dennis via D.gnu <d.gnu at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, 1 October 2019 at 20:16:14 UTC, Sjoerd Nijboer wrote:
> > That's what confuses me, according to the GDC project website
> > that is linked to at the dlang download page the underlying GCC
> > version of GDC is 3 major versions behind GCC.
> > Should I be worried if I want to use GDC?
>
> As far as I understand it / remember, the DMD frontend version
> that was merged into GCC 9 was based on the last version of the
> DMD that was still written in C++ before it got bootstrapped to D
> (2.068 or something) because GCC 9 needs to be able to be
> compiled with GCC 8 (which doesn't have D).
>
> Now GCC 9 has D, a more modern version of DMD's frontend can be
> merged into GCC 10.
> However, there is some trouble because a recent bug-fix (the
> non-global template issue, 5710) made it harder to update the D
> frontend for GDC because it changed the glue code significantly,
> which has to be adapted / reverted for GCC's backend.
>
> See: https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/9702#issuecomment-516737748
>
> I haven't heard anything since, so I don't know what's going to
> happen.
> Iain Buclaw is the one qualified to talk about this.
>
> I personally just use LDC currently, which closely follows DMD
> releases.
> It would be really cool if GCC contains a modern D compiler
> though.

At this rate, the best things to focus on will be getting more ports
and platforms added and feature complete - OSX, MinGW, BSDs on SPARC,
PPC, HPPA, etc...

There are a couple bootstrap problems that have come to light both
from compiling with current dmd master, or when testing for the first
time the jump from first to second stage bootstrap.

I have taken pretty much 4 months off with intermittent brief returns
since Dconf to rebase and test dmd master (those who were present at
Dconf will know why) and my free time will likely only reduce further
from here on out for the next decade or so.

-- 
Iain