Official DMD compiler written in D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2013 at 07:48:58PM +0100, Tim Krimm wrote:
> 
> Now that D 2.0 is fairly stable, are there any plans of writing the
> official DMD compiler with the D 2.0 language vs the present
> language of C++?
> 
> DMD 2.0 would have to be feature frozen and then DMD 3.0 could be
> written with the previous DMD 2.0 compiler.
> 
> What are your thoughts?

Philosophically, I like this idea. D should eat its own dogfood to prove
its own worth. :)

However, having the D compiler itself written in D, means we will have
trouble bootstrapping it on new platforms. The advantage of having a C++
implementation is that C/C++ compilers are almost the first thing that
gets implemented on a new platform, so you can almost always count on
their existence. So you can just compile DMD and away you go.

We *could* write a cross-compiler, of course, but it still requires that
you first target the D compiler (written in D) to the new platform, and
then cross-compile itself to that platform.  Whereas with DMD, you just
use the target platform's C++ compiler and you're up and running.


T

-- 
What's a "hot crossed bun"? An angry rabbit.