Should LLVM become the default D-lang platform?

[John Colvin]

On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 21:00:47 UTC, Dwhatever wrote:
> On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 20:54:06 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
>> On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 20:51:19 UTC, Dwhatever wrote:
>>> This might have been brought up before but I couldn't find 
>>> any thread about this. As things has progressed I wonder if 
>>> Digital Mars DMD should move over to use LLVM instead of its 
>>> own code generation and compiler framework.
>>>
>>> As I see it with the small amount of contributors D-language 
>>> has, DMD will never support anything beyond x86 as there are 
>>> no resources for this. Also, why spend time on recreating the 
>>> the code generation which has already been done with LLVM? 
>>> This enables this community to focus on the language which is 
>>> the most important part as well as supporting more and future 
>>> processor targets.
>>
>> This comes up regularly. It's already been done. Ldc *is* dmd 
>> with llvm backend. Gdc is the same idea but with the gcc 
>> framework.
>
> Picking LLVM as the default development platform also means 
> that it will tested in this environment instead of porting it 
> all the time which introduce new bugs. The support is also 
> different among the different backends, picking one would 
> harmonize this and make it more complete.


Hopefully, when the ddmd changeover happens (translating the 
frontend to D) the frontend will be truly shared between the 
different compilers.