LLVM progress

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2013-09-07 at 10:08 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
[…]
> Having 3 different D compilers with different strengths and weaknesses spurs 
> improvements in all of them. When I was at GoingNative2013, it was pretty 
> obvious to me that the playful and friendly competition between gcc, clang, and 
> vc has improved all three greatly.

As has been proved in many areas of life, having multiple players in a
game validates the game. Having multiple compilers, books, IDEs etc. for
D programming is a mark that D is player in the programming languages
game.

Sadly D is still not competing against C++ in the way it deserves. Of
course C++ is now a niche language. The primary "war" just now is native
vs. VM, and VM remains in the ascendency. Go and Rust are the "poster
children" for native due to their backers. The questions is whether D
should position itself in this "war". I say yes.

There needs to be more books on D, and use of D in various areas. QtD,
GtkD, (wxD?), D drivers for SQL, Mongo, Couch, Redis, Neo, Riak, etc.
all need to be high quality and pushed via reports and talks at non-D
conferences. Vibe.d is a huge possibility now that Node.js is losing
it's "lustre" and Vert.x and Go are getting serious traction. (At least
in the small start-ups arena.)

D in GCC and D on LLVM are, for me, far more important than DMD, since
they provide penetration into the market via the market leaders. D on
Linux via GCC and LLVM, D on OX S via LLVM, (and on Windows, I suppose,
via any route :-).

The issue for me is to stop worrying about internal contemplative
reflection on 10 years of D evolution, and get knowledge of the
real-world use of D out there and in people's faces. Stop looking inward
and start looking outward. This is the trick Go and Rust have picked up,
albeit not as well as they could.  D is a major player in the GCC and
LLVM worlds, let's take this as read and exploit it for the future of
high-quality, effective and pleasurable native code development.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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