Microsoft to contribute to Clang and LLVM project

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 02:22:34 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
Grøstad wrote:
> On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 01:09:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Let's see, did I miss a reason?  These are all the ones I've 
>> read on the forum in the past.
>
> But the real question is whether it is a strategic good move?

Doesn't matter if it is or it isn't, he has decades invested in 
it and will not even look at another backend.  Since he's the 
only one working on it and not that much (with some nips and 
tucks from Martin, Daniel, Rainer, Kenji, and a few others: 
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/commits/master/src/backend), I don't see why others are so concerned about it.  A better use of their time would be to chip in themselves, on documentation or whatever else they're capable of contributing.

> Go is the only language now that use its own backend and they 
> loose performance over it, and get bad comments for it, but 
> they get to tailor it to a reasonable GC so it has some 
> strategic value.
>
> Rust recently announced that Mozilla is going to include Rust 
> code in their products in 2016. So they are committed.
>
> The science people seem to rally behind Julia JIT, and a JIT 
> and mindshare is important in that field.
>
> With Swift on Linux the ARC approach becomes less attractive 
> for other languages as you put yourself up for direct 
> comparison. If Swift can get reasonable performance on Linux 
> and Android then they will take a fair marketshare real fast 
> because of tooling and portability, both on mobile and even on 
> web servers.

There is no one language that will work for every market.  With 
the advent of trends like micro-services, you can even use 
multiple languages in the same company relatively safely.  D 
tries to hit a lot of markets, but it cannot possibly hit the 
sweet spot in every market.  Perhaps those are better tools for 
those markets, while D will hit different segments of those 
markets and new markets altogether.

> In this crowded "close to production ready" landscape 
> competition becomes more fierce. I think languages like Swift 
> going cross platform will create trouble for languages like Nim 
> and D.

I agree that Swift is a strong competitor, as I've been saying, 
but it is currently way behind D in platform support, ie 
currently just iOS, OS X, and largely done linux/Glibc.  Each has 
their pros and cons and will garner their own adherents.