LDC

[Russel Winder]

Andrei,

On Fri, 2012-09-14 at 08:05 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
[…]
> Could please the responsibles update the project homepage? After that 
> I'll be glad to link to it from dlang.org/download.html.

To chip in on a purely marketing angle: I wonder if a regularly reviewed
and updated page on DMD/GDC/LDC comparison might we worth setting up.
People coming to D will invariably ask "Which of these implementations
of the D language is the one for me?"

Certainly
http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?D__Tutorial/StartingWithD/Compiler
exists, but it is very factual rather than comparative. Of the other
Google hits to the query "DMD GDC LDC", top 3 items for me were:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6767065/dmd-vs-gdc-vs-ldc appears to
be in need of updating and for some bits of misinformation to be
corrected to avoid FUD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language) could perhaps do
with a review and update? Information tries to be objective and factual
but this means no comparative. 

http://www.incasoftware.de/~kamm/projects/index.php/2008/07/09/compilers-for-the-d-programming-language/ biased :-) but more importantly an old personal blog entry about starting LDC rather than being a comparative item.

The issue for me I guess is why I would ever use DMD? OK it is the
reference implementation, but the LDC and GDC are much more likely to be
easy to make a start with exactly because they integrate into known,
widely used and widely respected compiler toolchains. The problems
appear to be:

LDC seems completely up to date as a project but doesn't appear to have
good distribution paths into Fedora, Debian (and hence Ubuntu and Mint),
MacPorts, etc. Given the rise and rise of LLVM, it would be good for D
to be seen as an equal partner to C, C++, Fortran, etc. on that
infrastructure.

GDC seems to need to find some more resource so as to keep it up to date
and on a par with C, C++ and Fortran in the GCC toolchain.  GDC is not
in GCC 4.7 but was in 4.6, let us hope it it back in 4.8.

I have to admit, and this may be contentious, I wonder if work on DMD as
a full toolchain should stop, that the parser should be extracted as a
separate project with all backend effort being on the GDC and LDC
toolchains. Relying on backend toolchains that are already relied upon
seems like an easier route to market that trying to use a standalone
toolchain.  

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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