Official compiler

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 18 February 2016 at 11:42, Márcio Martins via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 10:16:40 UTC, Radu wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 00:35:01 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 22:57:20 +0000, Márcio Martins wrote:
>>>
>>> I was reading the other thread "Speed kills" and was wondering if there
>>>> is any practical reason why DMD is the official compiler?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Walter Bright is the lead developer, and for legal reasons he will never
>>> touch source code from a compiler he didn't write. And since DMD is
>>> something like twice as fast as LDC, there's at least some argument in
>>> favor of keeping it around.
>>>
>>> Should Walter retire, there's a reasonable chance that LDC will become
>>> the primary compiler. However, compilation speed is important.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure how different LDC and DMD are, but perhaps you could use
>>> DMD for development and LDC for production builds?
>>>
>>
>> Walter should not need to ever work on D compiler back-ends, there are *a
>> lot* of issues to be dealt with in the language implementation that are
>> front-end only or at least not backend related. There are others that can
>> work/already work with the LLVM backend and they seam to know what they are
>> doing.
>>
>> There warts and issues in the language/runtime/phobos are well know,
>> spending time fixing them is more valuable for the community rather than
>> having Walter (maybe others) working on any dmd backend stuff.
>>
>> As rsw0x suggested, a push to get LDC on sync with mainline, and
>> switching to it after it would make more sense in the long run. Probably
>> focusing on LDC and investing more man power will also help fix any perf
>> issues re. compile time, there should bot be much to loose here at least
>> for debug compile times.
>>
>> All this of course depends on Walter's willing to give up working on DMD,
>> whatever this means for him.
>>
>
> Walter doesn't have to give up working on DMD, right? Everyone could
> continue working on DMD, perhaps a few people could help on all three, I
> don't know... It's important if more people work on DMD and focus on
> polishing the frontend and language features, being the reference compiler,
> and used by all three compilers as well. What could potentially be
> important would be to backport key fixes/features from current frontend to
> LDC/GDC as well.
>

There seems to be a deterrence against backporting ie: 2.068 fixes to 2.066
for LDC/GDC.  I have no idea why, I do it all the time. :-)
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