Free the DMD backend

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 29 May 2016 at 10:56:57 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sun, 2016-05-29 at 04:08 +0000, Joakim via Digitalmars-d 
> wrote:
>> 
> […]
>> It would be nice if that happened, but Walter has said 
>> Symantec isn't interested.  Aren't ldc and GDC enough?
>
> This is why LDC should be seen in the D community as the main 
> production toolchain, and Dub should default to LDC for 
> compilation.

This is something which has been asked on my blog[1], and I do 
agree that having a completely free-as-in-freedom reference 
compiler would be an awesome win for the D ecosystem, and would 
pretty much kill most of the issues we have at distros to package 
D stuff. D is very unique with its half-proprietary compiler.
LDC seems to be a pretty good fit for replacing the backend. 
Shifting to LDC as reference compiler would basically mean to 
slowly give up DMD though, because other than being tested much, 
there wouldn't be a compelling reason to still use it when focus 
has shifted to LDC / GDC.
In any case, this is definitely something for Walter and Andrei 
to decide, and I do have a feeling that this question might have 
been raised already in the past...

[1]: 
http://blog.tenstral.net/2016/05/adventures-in-d-programming.html#comment-265879