Free the DMD backend

[Saurabh Das via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 30 May 2016 at 14:51:48 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> 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

The case for DMD though is compile speed. It really changes the 
way one writes programs and makes it possible to write bash 
script-like functionality in D because of a rapid compile-run 
cycle.

LDC and GDC are quite a bit slower than DMD. Is this gap inherent 
in the structure of these compilers or can there be an LDC mode 
which compiles as rapidly as DMD?