Mid-term vision review

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 3 April 2015 at 23:59, Kai Nacke via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Friday, 3 April 2015 at 18:04:14 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>>
>> Also, what are the plan for GDC and LDC if we move toward DDMD ?
>
>
> My plan with LDC is to use the CPP backend to produce a boot strap compiler
> and then compile the D source. Much work...
>
> Regards,
> Kai

Then we'd have to make sure that we never use any new compiler
features added after the switch to D in the frontend.  Otherwise the
CPP sources in stage1 will need to be continually maintained
alongside.

I think a couple of things need doing that would really help here:

1. Push for getting binary packages to be built and hosted in
distributor software repositories before the switch.  ie: Packages for
all supported targets on Archlinux, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE.
This makes life easier for the package maintainers of each of those
repos too, rather than have them go through a process of bootstrapping
unsupported targets via a cross-compiler.

2. Test the following configurations on native host/target
compilations (eg: x86 -> x86).

host=dmd build=ldc
host=dmd build=gdc
host=ldc build=dmd
host=ldc build=gdc
host=gdc build=dmd
host=gdc build=ldc

In the absence of a D host compiler, downloading binaries of one D
compiler should allow you to bootstrap any alternative D compiler.

Regards
Iain.