D street cred: Just a thought

[Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 4 March 2017 at 07:09:17 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> Just a thought for boosting D's street cred:
>
> Perhaps...take a worthwhile C/C++ project with real potential, 
> fork it, and port it to D. And make a real commitment to 
> maintaining it. Obviously a bit of a gambit, granted, but the 
> potential payout is improving a worthwhile tool's 
> maintainability while showing off a real-world example of the 
> benefits and practical worthiness of switching to D.
>
The compiler front-end did just that. I can not comment on the 
quality of the code but on the speed of compilation, wow, just 
wow.

Building v2.067 takes 1'38" on the server at work (westmere at 
2.2 GHz, gcc 6.2, dmd v2.073, single core build).
Building v2.073 takes 0'15" and most of that time is taken by 
building the backend which is still in C++.
If that were rewritten in D, I suppose building the compiler 
would take 2 or 3 seconds max.