Interested in being abreast of the GSoC 2012 projects? Here's how

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-05-21 21:48, Andrew Wiley wrote:

> Gee, thanks for your enthusiastic support for GSOC projects that will
> greatly forward the D ecosystem.
>
> Ultimately, what's useful to the D community (for reasons discussed in
> these NGs many times over) is that we have working, mature, feature-rich
> IDEs. The languages they're implemented in are mostly irrelevant, and in
> MonoDevelop's case, trying to add language support via a plugin written
> in D to an IDE written in C# would be silly. Would you extend Eclipse in
> C++? It just doesn't make any sense at all.

I see no reason why the compiler can't be implemented in D and have a C 
interface.

> What's more, building tools for D in languages other than D can be
> extremely useful. Every time a discussion for a D compiler written in D
> comes up, no one really likes to mention the benefits we've gotten from
> having a compiler written in C++:

Again as above.

>   - there are no bootstrapping problems because C++ exists on basically
> every platform D would ever want to target

Provide a C backend.

>   - GDC and LDC were built without reimplementing the entire compiler
> and exist on platforms DMD doesn't support

Just provide a C interface.

>   - GDC can be formally added to GCC without the aforementioned
> reimplementation of the compiler

That's a good point. I actually don't know what they would think about that.

> There's no shame in building off solid technologies, even if those
> technologies have no direct link to the D ecosystem. Building IDEs in D
> does demonstrate that D is powerful and useful, but except for Rainer
> Schuetze and Visual D (which actually /is/ written in D), D has not been
> the right tool for the job for reasons that have little to do with the
> language's actual merits.



> The response at this point is generally, "Why build off
> MonoDevelop/Eclipse/VisualStudio when you could build from scratch?" and
> again, the question is whether building from scratch makes sense.
> Existing frameworks exist, are very powerful, are already familiar to
> many developers, and are generally easier to build on. There's certainly
> nothing stopping anyone from working from scratch, but building from an
> existing framework will get faster results and all the aforementioned
> benefits. If the heap of abandoned incomplete IDE-from-scratch projects
> on DSource says anything, it says that fast results are important in
> community-driven projects.
>
> I, for one, look forward to seeing what Alex can build this summer. Best
> of luck as you start your project.
>
> Andrew

I agree.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg