D Compiler as a Library

[Manu]

On 13 April 2012 18:25, Jakob Ovrum <jakobovrum at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday, 13 April 2012 at 13:08:51 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>
>> SDC have a lot of theses, and I proposed a similar stuff for its
>> evolution. I think it is easier for SDC than it is for dmd considering the
>> codebase of both.
>>
>
> I think we've got the lexer and parser completely separate from
> most of the rest of the codebase (like the codegen), due to
> repeated requests from people who wanted to use these parts for
> IDEs and other tools.
>
> I've yet to see anyone actually go through with using it though,
> possibly because there is no documentation for a lot of it.
> Documenting these parts fully into something of a public API and
> then putting it online is definitely on the todo list. Perhaps
> there would be more motivation to do this rather than work on
> something else if someone actually tried using SDC in their
> project instead of just talking about it, so it's kind of a
> catch-22.
>
> That said, the parser is currently evolving alongside the
> codegen. When we want to start implementing new parts of the
> language, we iteratively add it to the parser, hence it's not
> complete. It's very easy to work with though and it's mostly a
> menial task (although it's kind of fun to produce beautiful
> parser errors :P).
>
> Anyway, for anyone interested, you can find us on Github and
> #d.sdc on FreeNode.
>

Just out of curiosity, why would anyone write a code gen these days? With
projects like LLVM, which can perform great codegen to basically any
architecture, you'd be crazy not to use that...
Surely 90% of the value of writing your own D compiler would be the unique
front end, which may have different design principles (like use as a lib,
usable on tools and stuff as discussed here) ?

I'm sorry to say, if you write your own codegen, I would never use your
compiler. If you use LLVM in the back end, I'll definitely give it a look,
then merit will depend entirely on the front end (speed, flexibility,
quality of error messages, runtime error detection, etc).
I know it's a fun exercise to write a codegen, so from an educational
perspective, sure, it's valuable to you as a programmer, but I don't think
it helps your project at all.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20120414/7ff0cf57/attachment.html>