DLF September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary

[max haughton]

On Sunday, 12 November 2023 at 19:50:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Well. For the first time in all my years of using these forums, 
> I've managed to post something that exceeds the byte limit. 
> You'll find the September 2023 Monthly Meeting Summary at the 
> following link:
>
> https://gist.github.com/mdparker/f28c9ae64f096cd06db6b987318cc581

Two notes:

- Making the build bit of build.d simpler would be nice although 
reading the source code will reveal that it doesn't just build 
the compiler.

- I think Martin is wrong about not upstreaming stuff from LDC 
into DMD. Nothing good will come of them diverging (which they 
already have).

The UX of having multiple compilers is already terrible — 
conservatively let's estimate that "oh you need to download LDC 
if you want a compiler with an optimizer that works to a modern 
standard" halves the number of people bothering to try D.

Every little detail that you have to think about other than 
actually writing code hurts D both in terms of adoption and 
massive fragmentation of the projects people have to contribute 
to.


Standardising proper hooks such that LDC doesn't have to use a 
fork of the frontend (it's not really dmd-as-a-library in any 
sense that would be tolerated for a smaller project) is also 
important dogfooding for the frontend as a codebase.