dmd & gdc

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 26-01-2012 18:06, xancorreu wrote:
> Al 26/01/12 17:15, En/na H. S. Teoh ha escrit:
>> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 01:34:39PM +0100, Trass3r wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 26 January 2012 at 11:46:19 UTC, sami wrote:
>>>> my question is if there thing i can do with dmd only and visa
>>>> versa?
>>>> what the feature of one of them over the other?
>>>> what the different between them in term of inline assembly,
>>>> performance, platform and bugs?
>>> They share the frontend, i.e. language support is pretty much the
>>> same.
>>> dmd's backend is limited both in terms of performance and platform
>>> support (x86 only), but it compiles D code faster.
>>> gdc inherits gcc's sophisticated optimizer capabilities, but may
>>> have unique bugs in its glue code.
>> gdc also inherits gcc's multiplatform support, together with platform
>> specific optimizations common to all gcc-based compilers.
>
> I note that gdc is completely free software but dmd runtime is not. An
> alternative is ldc, also free.

Huh? Surely you mean the DMD back end? Everything else is either GPL or 
Boost.

>>
>>
>>> On Windoze gdc is really preferable cause the dmd/dmc toolchain is
>>> just crap and doesn't support x64 at all. Building gdc yourself is
>>> PITA on Win though.
>> Building gcc in general is a pain. It's just a little less painful on
>> *nix systems, but still painful.
>>
>>
>>> On Linux the difference isn't that big.
>> Hmm, maybe somebody should write a D compiler in D. That will prove that
>> D is a worthwhile language. ;-) You can then bootstrap it by compiling
>> it with gdc, dmd, or whatever you wish, then recompile it with itself
>> (gcc-style). All sorts of neat stuff you can do there.
>>
>>
>> T
>>
> A painful is the lack of documentation: there is only API/Classes docs
> and few html pages. The books are non-free and there are not worth
> tutorials. I like D but definitively it makes me back!. Compare for
> example golang and D. Both relatively new languages (D is elder) and you
> have many more docs about golang than D. You have not a bunch of docs,
> docs you get with python or perl, but it's worthy amount.
>
>
> Just my opinion,
> Xan.

- Alex