Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Sat Apr 20 06:48:31 UTC 2019


On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 06:34:17AM +0000, JN via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 19 April 2019 at 21:37:14 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > Sorry, I find this statement outright ridiculous.  In the past, we
> > had only 1 compiler, and the doomsayers complained that D only has 1
> > compiler, seeing it as proof that D is niche and not worthy of
> > attention -- because otherwise compiler writers would be falling
> > over themselves to write implementations of the language and
> > producing multiple compilers for it.  Now that we have 3 compilers,
> > the doomsayers complain that we should only have 1 compiler, and see
> > having 3 compilers as proof that something is wrong.
> 
> Well, depends on which compiler is the only one. In the past it was
> DMD, and well, DMD has it's benefits, but it's codegen is not the
> greatest and it was attached to OPTLINK for way too long, causing a
> lot of headaches. It's easy to see why would people criticize it. If
> the LDC was the only compiler, I don't think people would complain as
> much (based on popular 'compiler framework', crossplatform, great
> codegen).

I understand that -- I myself am none too pleased with dmd's codegen
quality, and regularly advise people to use LDC or GDC if they're
worried about performance.

But what I don't understand is how having multiple compilers for a
language is construed to be a bad thing.  Back in the day, it was
considered a sign of language maturity that multiple compiler
implementers would even want to bother to produce their own compilers
for your language.  It was when nobody else cared enough to write their
own compilers for your language, that was a sign that you've failed to
become relevant.  To see the opposite being argued just boggles my mind.


T

-- 
I think Debian's doing something wrong, `apt-get install pesticide', doesn't seem to remove the bugs on my system! -- Mike Dresser


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