Official compiler

Márcio Martins via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Feb 18 02:45:54 PST 2016


On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 06:57:01 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
> On Wednesday, 17 February 2016 at 22:57:20 UTC, 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?
>>
>> Currently, newcomers come expecting their algorithm from 
>> rosetta code to run faster in D than their current language, 
>> but then it seems like it's actually slower. What gives?
>>
>> Very often the typical answer from this community is generally 
>> "did you use LDC/GDC?".
>>
>> Wouldn't it be a better newcomer experience if the official 
>> compiler was either LDC or GDC?
>> For us current users it really doesn't matter what is labelled 
>> official, we pick what serves us best, but for a newcomer, the 
>> word official surely carries a lot of weight, doesn't it?
>>
>> From a marketing point of view, is it better for D as a 
>> language that first-timers try the bleeding-edge, latest 
>> language features with DMD, or that their expectations of 
>> efficient native code are not broken?
>>
>> Apologies if this has been discussed before...
>
> Hi,
>
> even if DMD is the official reference compiler, the download 
> page http://dlang.org/download.html already mentions "strong 
> optimization" as pro of GDC/LDC vs. "very fast compilation 
> speeds" as pro of DMD.
>
> If we would make GDC or LDC the official compiler then the next 
> question which pops up is about compilation speed....
>
> Regards,
> Kai

I agree that there is potential for compilation speed to become 
the new question, but I don't think it's very likely for 
newcomers to have larger codebases to compile for compilation 
speed to matter.

I suppose it's a lot easier to address the compilation speed 
issue in LDC/GDC, than to improve and maintain DMD's backend to 
the expected levels, right?


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list