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

[Exil]

On Thursday, 1 August 2019 at 23:54:28 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/1/2019 4:05 PM, Exil wrote:
>> On Thursday, 1 August 2019 at 20:24:12 UTC, Walter Bright 
>> wrote:
>>> 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.
>> 
>> So D suffers and can't make any significant changes to the 
>> backend in order to accommodate an old dead project that isn't 
>> being actively developed?
>
> In my not-so-humble experience, shuffling code about is too 
> easy, usually an illusion of progress (look ma! I changed lots 
> of lines of code!).

Who said it was for "progress"? Don't paint it as something it 
isn't. It's usually about maintainability and readability. 
Something the backend lacks. Lack of comments, horrible naming 
convention, etc... With documentation like this:

     /*****************
      * Free code
      */
     void code_free(code *cstart)

> Refactoring to improve the design and flow of the code is much 
> harder, usually requiring a thorough understanding of the code. 
> Switching the backend to using CodeBuilder is an example of 
> such.

There's more to it than that. I once had to refactor a monolithic 
class. It had dozens of functions that it really shouldn't have. 
I didn't write the code, someone else did and other developers 
over the years kept adding onto it until it got to the state it 
was in. It was first easier to -reshuffle- refactor the code into 
separate files to better understand how it works and to decouple 
everything. It made the code more readable and easier to 
understand, and from there to easily be redesigned into 
appropriate.

Kind of like how when you go from C -> D, rather than rewriting 
it in idiomatic D straight away, it is easier and reduces bugs to 
do a direct conversion from C to D. I think this is something you 
should be familiar with.