D frontend

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/6/16 11:34 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> As there has been some interest at DConf, I have pushed the experimental
> D frontend I have been hacking on to github under the boost licence (for
> compatibility with DMD).
>
> https://github.com/tgehr/d-compiler
>
> It is not yet feature-complete (e.g. constructors, destructors,
> exception handling,... is missing), but it handles e.g. large portions
> of templates and CTFE. (CTFE uses a byte code interpreter.)
>
> One major goal of this project is to figure out a good way to handle
> non-trivial compile-time dependency structures (i.e. solving the
> "forward reference error" problem). As it does explicit dependency
> tracking on AST nodes, it can possibly be used for fine-grained
> (AST-level) incremental compilation in the future.
>
> Unfortunately the only version of DMD that builds the project is 2.060
> (due to forward reference errors with newer versions).
>
> It is not exactly well documented at the moment, so feel free to contact
> me if something does not make sense. (There are some really ugly hacks
> working around the lack of UDAs in 2.060, for example.)

Great news! I think an excellent first step would be to get you or 
another contributor to reduce the forward reference matter to a small 
size. That would help a fix. -- Andrei