Distributor's whishlist and questions for D

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 21 April 2016 at 01:01:01 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> ## How complete are the free compilers?
> ## Why is every D compiler shipping an own version of Phobos?

These two can be answered at once. LDC and GDC share the same 
frontend code as DMD, but not the glue layer and backend (don't 
worry, it's only the DMD backend that has the more restrictive 
licence). Language and library development happens in DMD and 
with regard to DMD's current capabilities. Changes to DMD and 
druntime often require effort to port to LDC and GDC, due to the 
different backends. So an LDC or GDC release is complete w.r.t. a 
given past DMD version, but new features may have been added in 
more recent DMDs.

The constraints on shipping a shared phobos between them:
ABI compatibility: we don't have it, even across compiler versions
It would hold back phobos development (e.g. "you can't do that, 
because GDC doesn't support it yet")
You would still need to ship a separate runtime for each 
compiler, so you don't really gain anything.