Migrating dmd to D?

[Iain Buclaw]

On 6 March 2013 09:28, John Colvin <john.loughran.colvin at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>


This is not new.  Though people seem to only just be speculating the idea
in the NG, the truth is that this has started to happen around 2 months
ago.  However this is a slow process that will take time.


Regards
-- 
Iain Buclaw

*(p < e ? p++ : p) = (c & 0x0f) + '0';
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