D vs Go in real life

[Iain Buclaw]

On 12 December 2013 23:01, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
<joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:
> On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 22:46:26 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> On 12/6/2013 4:13 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>>>
>>> So, that means that if you need the ability to get fast turnaround on
>>> bugfixes
>>> or new features, you HAVE to run DMD.
>>
>>
>> Or, you could contribute to the gdc and ldc projects!
>
>
> Well, when I first contributed to Phobos I looked into getting the same
> patches accepted into GDC, not least because I wanted the functionality for
> my own work. It wasn't really a workable thing to do, both because of the
> lack of common git history and because GDC (as LDC) works by matching the
> features of the current stable release -- so adding stuff only available via
> git-HEAD Phobos wasn't really an option.
>

Well patches that go into phobos will soon hit gdc (eventually) - and
there's nothing wrong with cherry picking much needed patches prior to
release, if you can't wait 6 months for the next release and your bug
to be fixed.

Of course, what you can't guarantee is if fixing a bug in phobos has
some dependency on semantic changes/but fixed in the frontend.

> That situation would be much different if the frontend were truly common
> across all backends.

It's not too bad nowadays, I'll update the differences list sometime
today, but the only notable differences now between the two are:

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/2694
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/2200
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/2176

Where unless #2694 is applied, gdc will FTBFS.  And unless #2200 and
#2176 are applied, gdc will ICE when compiling certain code.

Regards
Iain.