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

David Nadlinger see at klickverbot.at
Thu May 10 12:03:48 PDT 2012


On Thursday, 10 May 2012 at 14:03:15 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> 2. Walter does not want to "taint" his knowledge of compilers 
> with some
> other backend that would potentially harm his ability to write
> closed-source code for profit.  He is very adamant about this.

That's what I would have answered as well, from what I recall 
from previous discussions – but Walter, could we please get a 
definite statement from you? As far as I recall, most of the time 
a discussion of this topic came up so far, it went largely 
without any comments by you, even though you are the only person 
really qualified to answer any questions on this topic…

> I think the only real solution is for someone to write a good 
> backend for
> D from scratch, and then assign the appropriate rights to 
> Walter. I think
> if Walter did it himself, it leaves dmd open to lawsuit from 
> the current
> copyright holder of the backend, since Walter's knowledge is so
> intertwined with that code.

What exactly would that buy us – I don't quite see how it would 
allow Walter to work on it, compared to, say, LLVM or GCC. And I 
don't buy the argument that Walter can't look at the source of 
compilers not owned by him, because it supposedly might make him 
vulnerable to copyright claims. Program optimization is a quite 
well-researched topic, and besides, even if DMC was somehow 
»tainted« by LLVM code, Walter would just have to add a 
copyright note to the docs and could continue to distribute DMD 
under his own terms – LLVM is BSD(-style) licensed.

Besides, writing another new backend just for D/DMD would be pure 
madness in terms of resources required – even LLVM, which is 
backed by a bunch of companies, has a hard time against GCC in 
terms of optimization, let alone ICC (on x86).

David


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