Official compiler

[David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 11:12:57 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> And actually, he'd risk legal problems if he did, because he 
> doesn't want anyone to be able to accuse him of taking code 
> from gcc or llvm.

That's a silly strawman, and you should know better than putting 
that forward as an argument by now.

Walter is of course free to do whatever he pleases, and I would 
totally understand if his reason was just that it's hard to give 
something up you've worked on for a long time.

But please don't make up argument trying to rationalize whatever 
personal decision somebody else made. You could literally copy 
LLVM source code into your application and sell it as a 
closed-source product without risking any copyright problems (if 
you comply with the very modest attribution clause of the 
license).

> If anything, the problem is probably that the gdc and ldc folks 
> could use more help, but dmd and Phobos suffer from that 
> problem on some level as well, albeit probably not as acutely.

The problem that many of us are seeing is that D development is 
unnecessarily defocussed by spreading out the effort between 
three different compilers. Of course, ideally we would have 
infinite manpower. A "special-case" compiler that boasts lower 
compile times for x86 development would definitely be nice to 
have then. But our resources aren't limitless, and as such the 
question whether we can afford to maintain such a "nice to 
have"-compiler is very relevant.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that there is an argument to be 
made for the current situation. And, by the way, let me make very 
clear that even if I argue that sticking to DMD is a strategic 
mistake, this is not about personal things. I highly respect 
Walter as a compiler developer and like him as a person. But 
perpetuating ill-informed arguments really doesn't do this debate 
any good.

  — David