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

[Michel Fortin]

On 2012-05-10 04:09:28 +0000, "Era Scarecrow" <rtcvb32 at yahoo.com> said:

> On Thursday, 10 May 2012 at 03:40:54 UTC, Michaël Larouche wrote:
>> It's a crazy idea I know, but maybe we could, as a community,  buy the 
>> rights from Symantec. Blender was a close-source  program originally 
>> and the open-source community raised money  to buy the source code from 
>> the defunct company that made  Blender.
> 
>   I'd prefer to see LLVM used as the back end; mostly based on emerging 
> technologies and it's likely a bit cleaner than GNU.

When doing the DMD/Objective-C project[1], I was somewhat torn between 
building it on top of LDC (LLVM) or directly within DMD. I chose the 
second option because I wanted this to be later merged within the 
reference compiler, and Walter has been supportive of that. But that 
choice meant I could not reuse the code from LLVM/Clang for emitting 
the Objective-C binaries (I had to build it from scratch), and it means 
no ARM support (for iOS) until either DMD supports ARM or my changes 
get somehow ported to LDC (which probably won't be that 
straightforward).

For me, hacking the reference compiler is more work for initially less 
results… and this might have contributed to things being currently 
stalled. There is a big potential benefit to hacking the reference 
implementation: it's easier to keep things in sync later. But if it 
stalls initial development, there's no such benefit. Something tells me 
that if I restart the project, it might very well be top of LLVM 
instead of DMD, improvements to the reference compiler be damned.

In my opinion, the front end would gain much by being a standalone 
library: same library could be used with separate glue code for each 
backend. It'd also help to have a single druntime being shared between 
all those. I can always dream…

 [1]: http://michelf.com/projects/d-objc/

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/