dmd codegen improvements

[Jack Stouffer via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 28 August 2015 at 11:53:20 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> On 28-Aug-2015 14:18, Temtaime wrote:
>> So comparing to llvm the idea of optimizing backend comes with:
>>
>> 1) LLVM optimizes code much better than DMD for now. And it's 
>> in active
>> development, so it always will be far from DMD.
>
> In producing better code very it well may be. Faster - I don't 
> think so.
>
>> 2) LLVM has over 120k commits, it has many financial 
>> investments from
>> Google and Apple. Are you sure that ONE Walter can achieve 
>> what they done ?
>> 3) LLVM supports many platforms while DMD will never support 
>> anything
>> different from x86.
>
> We do not need to do the new LLVM thing. Then the rest of 
> argument is destroyed.

You ignored probably the most important point in that post. 
Getting DMD to work on ARM would be a huge undertaking, probably 
so large that I don't think it will ever happen. This is a huge 
bummer because this essentially means getting D on phones or 
cheap computers is a pipe dream.

LDC's ARM branch shows that it can be done with LLVM as a back 
end. It doesn't support 64 bit and I believe that exception 
handling still doesn't work, but if there was more man power 
dedicated to it, it would be possible.