The D ecosystem in Debian with free-as-in-freedom DMD

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 14:33:34 UTC, qznc wrote:
> On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 11:40:12 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
>>   1) Is there some perspective on D getting a defined ABI that 
>> works with all major D compilers?
>>   2) What would the D community recommend on how to deal with 
>> the ABI issues currently? A Linux distribution is a bunch of 
>> tightly integrated software, and changing one piece in an 
>> incompatible way (e.g. by building it with LDC instead of DMD) 
>> will have consequences.
>>   3) Will DMD support more architectures in the near future? 
>> How should the architecture issue be handled?
>
> My prediction for Walters reply:
>
> 1) No. Not worth it, because templates, ctfe, etc.

That's short-sighted IMHO, because if the template doesn't 
change, ABI/API doesn't change. Also, some projects use D as 
better C and don't expose this functionality. It should be up to 
the project to set the level of API/ABI stability, and not to the 
compiler to make everything unstable by default.

> [...]
> Tentative ping, but that Wiki page is not helpful. The linked 
> svn repo is empty. Where and how do you work?

Yeah, the page is really poor, it was last touched in 2012. I 
made a few updates to at least link to the current Git repo.
We generally work on various Git repositories, but not all of 
them are run by the D team (e.g. libundead and libbiod as well as 
several games are things I am aware of that aren't D-team 
maintained but are part of other team's work).

One can find all stuff using D by testing the 
reverse-build-depends on the LDC and GDC compilers.

> I guess the issue are still the same as you wrote here (except 
> 1. is solved):
> https://gist.github.com/ximion/fe6264481319dd94c8308b1ea4e8207a
>
> So, mostly dub needs work, I guess.

Yes, but since Meson is working well and Meson scripts are easy 
to write, it's not a super high priority item anymore.
As I said earlier, work as a distribution developer is pretty 
much always about reducing long-term maintenance cost, and not 
about less work short-term, which means we will gladly write 
Meson or Automake scripts to integrate software into Debian if 
there is a demand for it.

On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 15:11:01 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 11:40:12 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
>>   3) Will DMD support more architectures in the near future? 
>> How should the architecture issue be handled?
>
> This can be definitively answered as "no", 
> https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15108

> *Walter Bright*:
> Doing an ARM back end wouldn't be that hard. It's much less 
> complex than x86. Most of the work would be deleting about half 
> of the x86 code generator :-)

:D - doesn't sound like a flat-out no, much more like there just 
wasn't someone doing the work yet.