Red Hat's issues in considering the D language

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, December 22, 2016 00:59:27 hardreset via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 18:33:52 UTC, Brad Anderson
> >> Moving the reference compiler to LLVM as was suggested in the
> >> list.
> >
> > I've never been able to understand why it matters.
>
> Cause people think LDC is better and it would be a big win if
> everyone focused just on that. It's not about which has "official
> compiler" slapped on it, it's about where the development effort
> is focused.

Most of the focus is on the frontend, not any of the backends. So, most of
the work is automatically shared across all of the compilers. It's just that
the frontend isn't 100% compiler agnostic (though work has been done to get
it there), so some work has to be done to get it and the glue layer updated,
and dmd gets that first. LDC isn't far behind though. GDC's main problem is
the hump in getting from the frontend being in C++ to it being in D, and
once they've got that sorted out, I expect that they'll be _much_ faster at
updating.

Regardless, most of the effort is going towards stuff that has nothing to do
with the compiler backend.

- Jonathan M Davis