Should LLVM become the default D-lang platform?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/10/14 12:56 PM, John Colvin 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.
>
> also, the digital mars backend is very fast, which is actually good
> selling point for some use-cases where compilation speed is important.

We plan to rig Facebook's build system to use dmd in debug mode and gdc 
in release mode by default. Best of both worlds.

Andrei