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

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, May 10, 2012 10:16:10 Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 10/05/12 03:14, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > If nothing else, because Walter would be unable to work on it. He avoids
> > looking at the source for any other compilers, because doing so could
> > cause
> > him legal issues when working on dmd/dmc's backend, which he does
> > professionally. And given that Walter has worked on the backend for over
> > 20
> > years, I can't imagine that he's going to be all that excited at the
> > prospect of throwing it away in favor of another one.
> 
> Is that an issue for LLVM, which is BSD-licensed? I will understand if the
> answer is, "I don't care, I don't even want to risk it."

You'll have to talk to Walter if you want to know what exactly he is willing 
and isn't willing to do or what he can and can't do.

> > Once the front-end has stabilized (and it's getting there), it should
> > become a non-issue, because then even if gdc and ldc are a version or two
> > behind, it won't affect anywhere near as much (it will also likely become
> > easier at that point for the gdc and ldc devs to keep them up-to-date).
> 
> Yes, I agree. That's why I suggested as an alternative trying to
> synchronize releases of DMD, GDC and LDC so that they are always
> feature-equivalent, and endorsing all 3 as official implementations of the
> reference standard.

They all use the same front-end. I don't think that we really need to go any 
further than that. We have enough real, implementation stuff to worry about 
without increasing our workload like that. If anything, gdc and ldc just need 
more manpower. Then they'll always be caught up quickly after a dmd release. 
As the front-end matures, it'll take less effort to update to a new version of 
it anyway.

But if someone is going to consider dmd's backend's license to be an issue, 
they don't know enough to understand the situation properly, and I wouldn't 
expect anything with gdc and ldc to change that, since they'd _still_ have to 
know more to understand the situation properly. The fact that gdc and ldc 
_exist_ should solve the problem already, but we still get FUD. We'd still be 
getting FUD even if dmd's backend _were_ changed to the GPL, simply because it 
wasn't before. The situation can't really be fixed, so I don't see much point 
in trying to spend a lot of time and effort trying to fix it. We have a compiler 
that works quite well and is not closed source, much as that gets spread 
around, and we have _two_ _fully_ open source compilers for those who care. If 
that doesn't solve the problem, I don't think anything will short of making 
dmd's backend fully open source (which we can't do and wouldn't completely 
eliminate the FUD even if we did).

- Jonathan M Davis