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

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 22-05-2012 10:57, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> 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.

?

That doesn't solve the bootstrapping problem. You need a D compiler to 
build D code. And if the D compiler is written in D...

>
>> - 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.
>


-- 
Alex Rønne Petersen
alex at lycus.org
http://lycus.org