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?
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