D Compiler as a Library

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-04-14 12:35, Manu wrote:
> On 13 April 2012 18:25, Jakob Ovrum <jakobovrum at gmail.com
>     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.

I don't know what Jakob means with "codegen" in this case but SDC 
depends on LLVM. Have a look at the bottom of:

https://github.com/bhelyer/SDC

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg