GDC 0.18

[Brad Roberts]

On Sat, 27 May 2006, David Friedman wrote:

> Frank Benoit wrote:
> > Good to hear that GDC is absolutely active. Thanks.
> > 
> > Is it technically possible to build a gdc in D?
> > E.g with the sources of the dparser project?
> 
> It is possible.  I think interfacing the whole compiler directly to D would
> not be trivial, but writing most of the compiler in D (semantic processing)
> and a smaller part in C (generating GCC tree nodes) should be workable.
> 
> David

Though, that means an even longer, harder, upgrade path as dmd is 
upgraded.  Right now, gdc uses dmd almost directly, and with some time and 
effort, merging gdc's patches back to dmd will make that even easier.  By 
having to go and update a d implementation of dmd before gdc can use it, 
the work just gets harder with little gain.  Now, if DMD were to convert 
to D, thus using itself to build itself, then I can see the benefits.

I can see some benefits to moving the implementation to D, but there's an 
awful lot of costs that seem to me to greatly how way the benefits.

Do you see benefits that justify the costs that I'm missing?

Later,
Brad