Migrating D front end to D - post Dconf

[Johannes Pfau]

Am Sat, 11 May 2013 23:51:36 +0100
schrieb Iain Buclaw <ibuclaw at ubuntu.com>:

> 
> I am more concerned from GDC's perspective of things.  Especially
> when it comes to building from hosts that may have phobos disabled
> (this is a configure switch).
> 

Indeed. Right now we can compile and run GDC on every system which has a
c++ compiler. We can compile D code on all those platforms even if we
don't have druntime or phobos support there.

Using phobos means that we would always need a complete & working phobos
port (at least some GC work, platform specific headers, TLS, ...) on the
host machine, even if we:
* Only want to compile D code which doesn't use
  phobos / druntime at all.
* Create a compiler which runs on A but generates code for B. Now we
  also need a working phobos port on A. (Think of a sh4 -> x86 cross
  compiler. This works now, it won't work when the frontend has been
  ported to D / phobos)

(I do understand why it would be nice to use phobos though. Hacking
some include path code right now I wish I could use std.path...)