LDC2 Status [was: Marketing D]

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Walter Bright (newshound2 at digitalmars.com)'s article
> Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> > On 10/31/2010 06:30 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> >>
> >> Yes, and GDC and LDC are 100% GPL.
> >
> > That's nice, except that neither are suitable as a replacement for your
> > proprietary D2 compiler, which is the reference compiler and where all
> > the bleeding edge work is done.
> >
> > So strong statements like "D is fully open source" are misleading.
>  > The
> > open source compilers are always playing catch-up, and the people that
> > could be helping you out on the compiler are instead replicating your
> > efforts.
> I don't agree. There's very little, almost no, D specific support in the dmd
> back end. It's a C compiler back end. Nearly all the work is done in the front
> end, which should be little more than a cut & paste job for LDC and GDC once
> they are already up and running with the front end.
> The bugfix patches are nearly all tagged with specific updates to the source, so
> any one critical patch can be easily applied.
> There are 3 D compilers, 2.5 of which are GPL, and the source is available for
> the rest.

That reminds me:  What is the actual status of LDC2?  According to the somewhat
outdated-looking LDC wiki, it's highly unstable.  According to
http://bitbucket.org/prokhin_alexey/ldc2 serious progress is being made.  Is it in
a completely useless state?  An alpha state?  A beta state?

In the bigger picture, the only usable D2 implementation is DMD.  This isn't so
bad, as non-reference implementations always take awhile to catch up.  Jython, for
example, is still back on Python 2.5.  However, it would be nice if there were
multiple *usable* implementations of D2.