Why the DMD Backend?

Chris via Digitalmars-d-learn digitalmars-d-learn at puremagic.com
Tue Dec 2 03:13:17 PST 2014


On Tuesday, 2 December 2014 at 10:57:20 UTC, Temtaime wrote:
> It's only words.
> If we speak about LDC it can compile fast in debug mode with 
> performance average to DMD's backend but with much great 
> performance in release mode thanks to vectorization and other 
> techniques.
> Also LDC thanks to LLVM supports X86, X86-64, PowerPC, 
> PowerPC-64, ARM, Thumb, SPARC, Alpha, CellSPU, MIPS, MSP430, 
> SystemZ, and XCore platforms. And what about DMD? Only x86 and 
> x86-64.
>
> Just link LLVM statically with LDC and LDC will work out of the 
> box as DMD. No problems at both Windows and Linux.

That's good to hear. I never opposed to LDC nor GCD. In fact, LDC 
has the much needed support for other architectures. But the fact 
remains that dmd is a nice-to-have tool that works out of the 
box, and I don't see why there shouldn't be a dmd backend only 
because we have two other compilers. It always sounds as if a dmd 
backend somehow "harmed" the other two compilers.

Also, one has to set up the LLVM infrastructure etc., which is an 
extra step, unless LLVM works out of the box on Windows, which I 
might not be aware right now.


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