Migrating dmd to D?

[John Colvin]

On Wednesday, 6 March 2013 at 03:19:23 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 06, 2013 02:44:07 Rob T wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 6 March 2013 at 00:25:30 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
>> [...]
>> 
>> > My preference would be to completely replace the back-end 
>> > with
>> > LLVM. Why LLVM? Well as opposed to GCC it was designed from 
>> > the
>> > ground up to support many languages. The benefit here is that
>> > it is possible to create standalone compiler the generates 
>> > LLVM
>> > bytecode that can then be run through LLVM. My understanding
>> > (and I am happy to be corrected here) is that LLVM does not
>> > need the front-end to be compiled into the back-end.
>> 
>> That seems like the most obvious direction to take. Is there 
>> any
>> valid reason not to?
>
> Because LDC already does that, there are potential legal issues 
> with Walter
> working on other backends, and it's completely unnecessary. 
> It's a shame that
> the stance of debian and some other distros makes it so that 
> dmd can't be on
> them, but both gdc and ldc already exist and are both 
> completely FOSS. The
> picky distros can just stick with those, and if anyone using 
> them really wants
> the reference compiler, they can just install it themselves.
>
> I agree that it sucks that dmd's backend is not fully open 
> source, but the
> code is available to read and provide fixes for, and no code 
> compiled by it is
> affected by the license. All it really affects is whether it 
> can go on some
> Linux distros, and given that we have two other perfectly good 
> compilers which
> _can_ go on such distros, I don't think that it's at all worth 
> worrying about
> dmd's license. There are much, much more important things to 
> worry about (like
> bug fixing).
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Is it realistic to consider making the frontend completely 
portable across backends?

I'm imagining a situation where there is no gdc/ldc frontend, 
just glue to the backend. The advantages seem significant.