DDMD and such.

[Trass3r]

Am 28.09.2011, 15:09 Uhr, schrieb Gor Gyolchanyan  
<gor.f.gyolchanyan at gmail.com>:

> I know, this has been discussed earlier, but i don't quite understand
> the real reason why isn't DMD's front-end being written in D.
> Existing DDMD is pointless (and i think abandoned), because it's just
> a plain rewrite with the same C-style constructs and completely
> rewriting it to be a correct D code would mean being unable to get the
> bug-fixes on DMD.

Yep, it's pointless cause it inherits all of dmd's quirks.
Rewriting most of ddmd to overcome dmd's design flaws would be overkill.
Also keeping in sync with dmd is hard since there is no way of  
auto-applying patches. Everything has to be done by hand and believe me,  
it's not fun.

I think dmd should keep going its way and provide a base..
(remember that it also provides a base for gdc/ldc. If dmd switched to D  
there would also be no updates for LDC and GDC anymore)

..for a future new frontend written from scratch in D with a proper design  
that isn't restricted to a single application (i.e. compiler),
similar to Clang but properly implemented. Clang drifted away from its  
goals, especially the "easily hackable" one.

Unfortunately there is no such project yet.
Dil is quite nice, but it's D1 and GPL.