Lack of open source shown as negative part of D on Dr. Dobbs

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 09/05/12 23:38, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Joseph Rushton Wakeling"<joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net>  wrote in message
> news:mailman.465.1336596027.24740.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>>
>> The reason for proposing this is that currently if I wish to hack on
>> Druntime or Phobos, I _have_ to use DMD.  True parity of the open-source
>> compilers would be contributors being able to use their compiler of
>> choice.
>
> I didn't realize that was currently an issue. I agree, that ability would be
> nice.

Yesterday or the day before I pulled the latest Phobos into my dev branch and 
tried to compile it, only for some unittests to fall over rather nastily.  Of 
course, it was because the latest Phobos updates relied on some recent updates 
to DMD and/or Druntime: I had to pull and compile the latest versions of those 
before Phobos would compile and pass tests.

It's unlikely that GDC and/or LDC could pick up those sorts of updates quickly 
enough to not impact on developers, unless there's a deliberate policy of 
keeping feature parity.  So that means (for now) there's no way that one can 
reliably hack on Phobos using one of the fully open source compilers.

> Especially if/when we finally get good support for ARM-based phones
> and tablets (back in my day, we called them PDAs), as that would be
> completely non-DMD.

Yea, ARM support seems important to me too, both for phones, tablets etc. and 
for much of the new upcoming server solutions.  I also fancy coding with D on a 
Raspberry Pi. :-)

> Maybe, but I suspect most "not OSS" complaints would be coming from people
> who don't even know that much about D, and are just knee-jerking over "The
> main compiler's backend isn't OSS?!? Well fuck that, then!"

This is my fear as well. :-(