Official compiler

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 20:24:31 UTC, David Nadlinger 
wrote:
> 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).

It's not a strawman. Walter has state previously that he's 
explicitly avoided looking at the source code for other compilers 
like gcc, because he doesn't want anyone to be able to accuse him 
of stealing code, copyright infringement, etc. Now, that's 
obviously much more of a risk with gcc than llvm given their 
respective licenses, but it is a position that Walter has taken 
when the issue has come up, and it's not something that I'm 
making up.

Now, if Walter were willing to give up on the dmd backend 
entirely, then presumably, that wouldn't be a problem anymore 
regardless of license issues, but he still has dmc, which uses 
the same backend, so I very much doubt that that's going to 
happen.

- Jonathan M Davis