ARM first & default LDC

[Max Haughton]

On Saturday, 19 December 2020 at 18:23:19 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
Grostad wrote:
> On Saturday, 19 December 2020 at 17:40:28 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 19.12.20 18:15, claptrap wrote:
>>> 
>>> 2. People could just add it to LLVM if they want i think. 
>>> Might even be easier to write a whole new backend from 
>>> scratch, i dont know. IE. Not having DMD doesnt preclude the 
>>> benefit that Walter claims DMD gives us.
>>> 
>>
>> Building LLVM from scratch takes multiple hours. Building DMD 
>> from scratch (including backend) takes _seconds_.
>
> Why would you?
>
> Wasting effort on ARM when Apple is doing a best of breed for 
> free for LLVM is just silly. It is going to be a moving target, 
> M1 is just the first iteration. Save the resources for 
> something that matters...

You realise that that 80% (450k overall, backend is 90k) of the 
code in has nothing to do with the code generation.

Apple are also pretty reticent to upstream stuff to LLVM but that 
doesn't really matter because the dmd backend isn't and shouldn't 
be complicated enough to need that information.