DMD back end dev-kit

[BCS]

Reply to John,

> Hello Christopher,
> 
>> Robert Fraser wrote:
>> 
>>> It appears I have been officially "pwned" here. You & Bill are
>>> right; GDC/LLVMDC isn't sufficient.
>>> 
>> Or we could politely ask Walter to switch to llvm or gcc for the
>> backend for dmd. Hey, he actually changed opEquals to bool...
>> 
> Similar has been suggested on several occasions.  If you take a peek
> at previous
> postings in this group on the topic you will see his answer which
> invariably
> is "no" with a short explanation about "tainting" (or something
> similar).
> He doesn't want to look at any other compiler code (opensource or
> otherwise).
> It's a self-imposed rule to simplify his defense in any potential
> legal
> disputes, as I understand it, since he appears to still be in the
> compiler
> business.
> 
> This is completely understandable, but I think it hampers D's progress
> to some degree.  I'm not so sure we can ever get the backend by
> slapping down some money, but I'd agree that it would be great if
> something were done... moving to an opensource backend of one sort or
> another would be extremely good for D.
> 
> Whether or not our request is successful, the statement made here
> (about the donation) at least expresses how important it is to this
> community to see an active opensource backend as part of the reference
> compiler.  But we probably shouldn't get our hopes up too much: the
> issue hasn't budged one iota for quite a long time.  Yet, you never
> know. :)
> 

We could do it in reverse; compile the GCC backend as a lib, and ship that 
and the minimal headers to Walter and then he could develop DMD with that 
without ever seeing a line of (executable) GCC code. He might even be able 
to build and ship both GCC and DMC versions of DMD.