Interview with Liran Zvibel of WekaIO

[Joakim]

On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 08:02:21 UTC, M.M. wrote:
> On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> Joakim interviewed Liran for the D Blog about their file 
>> system, Matrix, and their use of D. Thanks to Joakim for 
>> putting it together, and to Liran for taking the time to 
>> participate!
>>
>> Blog:
>> https://dlang.org/blog/2018/12/04/interview-liran-zvibel-of-wekaio/
>>
>> Reddit:
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a3106x/interview_liran_zvibel_of_wekaio/
>
> Interesting read. I am new to dlang, and after reading the 
> post, I asked myself: the company liked the language, but 
> tweaked the compiler. Could the company now switch to one of 
> the official compilers? If not, why?

All three compilers listed on the official download page use the 
same frontend, written in D:

https://dlang.org/download

The LDC and GDC teams take that DMD frontend and attach it to the 
LLVM and GCC code-generation backends.

As for Weka's tweaks, github shows these different commits from 
their last 1.11 release to the official tag:

https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/compare/v1.11.0...weka-io:weka-2.071

I get the sense that's mostly patches backported from newer LDC 
releases, as they understandably go slower than official LDC for 
stability, and some git cruft from maintaining their own branch. 
Their tweaks don't appear to be substantial on a skim, which 
makes sense since Johan is a committer on the LDC team.

Since LDC is an OSS project, they're free to tweak it for their 
own use and use it as they like. Johan has done much work for 
them which they've contributed back upstream to LDC. See Johan's 
blog posts for more info:

http://johanengelen.github.io