Now that the dmd backend is in D...?

[Walter Bright]

On 8/1/2019 3:20 AM, Petar Kirov [ZombineDev] wrote:
> On Thursday, 1 August 2019 at 08:59:28 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 7/31/2019 8:03 PM, Jonathan Marler wrote:
>>> Now that the dmd backend is in D, are there plans to remove the old C++ 
>>> organization?
>>
>> No. It's still used to compile the DMC++ compiler. Trying to reshuffle all 
>> that around will cause me major problems.
> 
> Obviously we need a way to ensure that all changes to the backend don't cause 
> any problems for DMC++.
> 
> Would you be interested in the community setting up a repo with both dmd and 
> dmc, so each change to the backend (whether it is a bug fix, enhancement or 
> refactoring) is tested against both dmd and dmc - they both need to compile and 
> have their respective test suites pass.
> 
> If you're interested, we can brainstorm different possibilities:
> 
> * Move dmc repo to dmd/src/dmc, move dmc's tests to dmd/tests/dmc
> * Include dmd as a git submodule in the dmc repo - a PR that affects the backend 
> will need to be first merged in dmc and then dmd
> * etc...

That is possible now that DMC++ is Boost licensed. It's currently at:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler

and is reasonably in sync with DMD. However, having endured multiple grand 
reshufflings of the DMD source code, and having recently headed off yet another 
one, I'm not much in favor of it.

If you look at the history of the back end, you'll see I've been incrementally 
updating it to be more modern and more tractable. I expect to continue with that.

What I'd like to see, however, is to get the backend covered by the code 
coverage thing in the D test suite. Currently, only the front end is.