Swift is based LLVM,what will the D's LDC do?

Dejan Lekic via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Jun 4 05:11:29 PDT 2014


On Wednesday, 4 June 2014 at 09:45:21 UTC, Temtaime wrote:
> I think too that main branch of D should be LDC.
> Proprietary backend is one big mistake.

No matter how I like LDC, I disagree.
People obviously forget the fact that DMD is a REFERENCE 
IMPLEMENTATION of a D compiler. - Nobody has to use it, and most 
likely you will not use it in production! You will use a compiler 
with better optimizer, such as GCC with D enabled (GDC) or LDC.

FUD won't help anyone, so do not spread it further. We have 
discussed this matter for over a decade here on this very 
newsgroup. There is a valid reason why the backend is 
proprietary, learn to live with it.

>
> Some linux distributives doesn't want to include dmd because of 
> backend's license.
> Also backend has several codegen bugs.
> And it cannot optimize almost at all.

We are all perfectly aware of this. I've spent hours talking with 
Fedora guys on IRC, and asked what can we do to have DMD RPMs 
(you can find the project here: 
https://gitorious.org/dejan-fedora/dejan-fedora ).

>
> LLVM is tested in time as Clang.
> It has great optimizations.
>
> And if one speak about compilation time... Yes dmd compiles 
> faster than ldc but the difference is not so great. And who 
> cares about compilation time when one write the code ?

Every serious developer does. Once your project takes a minute to 
compile you will treasure every second... Sure for the release 
you will use a better compiler, but during the development you 
really want compiler that does it fast.


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