DDMD as showcase?

[Flamaros]

On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 04:19:12 UTC, Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "Xavier Bigand"  wrote in message 
> news:ldbpum$1pov$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
>> Firstly is there some progress on the DDMD project or maybe an 
>> other D boostrap?
>
> The old ddmd project is pretty much dead AFAIK 
> (http://www.dsource.org/projects/ddmd) and was never up to date 
> with the current compiler.
>
> For about a year I've been working on automatically converting 
> the compiler source from C++ to D.
>
> The conversion has produced a working compiler on 
> win32/linux32/linux64 (other platforms need trivial patches) 
> that compiles druntime/phobos/the test suite without errors.
>
> The current effort is around cleaning up the C++ source to 
> produce higher quality D code.  The next major step is to 
> actually switch development to the D version.
>
> Outstanding patches:
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/1980
>
> Conversion tool:
> https://github.com/yebblies/magicport2
>
> You can see some of the recent patches (marked DDMD) here:
> https://github.com/yebblies?tab=contributions&period=monthly
>
>> There is a lot of thread and debate around the GC of D, I 
>> interrogate me on the capacity of a project like DDMD to prove 
>> to every D users that the GC is perfectly usable for system 
>> applications. If not it will certainly be improve during the 
>> DDMD development to a point can satisfy almost everybody?
>
> There are no planned GC modifications for the DDMD project.  It 
> may result in some compiler devs taking more of an interest in 
> the GC.

That the idea. In all cases we need some proof of the validity of 
having a GC in a system language.

>> As I know DMD doesn't release memory, these will have to be 
>> fixed in DDMD to match the memory management most application 
>> have to apply.
>
> Yes, DDMD will use the GC, although it currently has it 
> disabled due to a segfault I haven't tracked down yet.
>
>> I see many interesting points in DDMD :
>>  - prove GC based compiler isn't longer to optimize than the 
>> C++ version (and capable to reach same performances)
>>  - will reveal more language issues or phobos miss.
>
> Maybe, but so far additions to the language have been minimal, 
> and DDMD does not currently use phobos.  It is also slower than 
> the C++ version, part of which is due to the GC being slower 
> than the bump-pointer allocator used in the C++ dmd.
>
>>  - will be easier to maintain and update
>
> Exactly!