Official compiler

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 2/18/16 8:11 AM, Márcio Martins wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 12:05:12 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 11:41:26 UTC, Kai Nacke wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 10:45:54 UTC, Márcio Martins wrote:
>>>> 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?
>>>
>>> LLVM has about 2.5 million code lines. I am anything than sure if it
>>> is easy to improve compilation speed.
>>
>> On some level, I would expect compilation speed and generating
>> well-optimized binaries to be mutually exclusive. To get those extra
>> optimizations, you usually have to do more work, and that takes more
>> time. I'm sure that some optimizations can be added to dmd without
>> particularly compromising compilation speed, and gdc and ldc can
>> probably be made to compile faster without losing out on
>> optimizations, but you can only go so far without either losing out on
>> compilation speed or on optimizations. And obviously, it's not
>> necessarily easy to make improvements to either, regardless of whether
>> it comes at the cost of the other.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> I agree with that. It also means that it would be considerably easier to
> have a setting in LDC/GDC that generates slightly worst code, and
> compiles slightly faster... perhaps never reaching the speed of DMD, but
> compilation speed is not the only factor, is it?
>
> GCC/LLVM have many more supported platforms and architectures, produce
> faster code, and have large communities behind them, constantly
> optimizing and modernizing, backed by it giants like Google, Apple, ...
>
> I cannot say for GCC but LDC also has considerably better tooling with
> the sanitizers.
>
> LDC seems to also be the closest to support all major platforms and
> architectures, including iOS and Android which are huge markets. It
> supports Win64/Win32 (experimental) out-of-the-box.
>
> Both LDC and GDC have no weird legal strings attached.
> Both can be distributed with major Linux distros.

Which of these advantages cannot be taken advantage of today?

> All that DMD has going for it is it's compilation speed.

Walter does most of the feature implementation work. Having a familiar 
back-to-back codebase is a big asset. Compilation speed is a big asset, 
too, probably not as big.

> These are all big points towards having more users experience and enjoy
> D as we do!
>
> To get more contributors, more people have to use and believe in the
> language. DMD has a lot of clear barriers for this.
>
> Really, not a lot has to change to start with, just fix the installers
> and slap the official tag in either LDC or GDC.

A step everybody would agree is good would be to make it easy for the 
three compilers to stay in sync.

Thanks for your work on the GC!


Andrei