ARM first & default LDC

[Timon Gehr]

On 19.12.20 22:04, Jeeferson wrote:
> On Saturday, 19 December 2020 at 20:36:07 UTC, Jeeferson 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_.
>>
>> Anyone that says LLVM takes multiple hours obviously hasn't built it, 
>> or are using a 20 year old computer to build it.
>>
>> Once you build LLVM you don't build it again. Unless you are modifying 
>> LLVM itself, which LDC only has one or two commits that make changes, 
>> for Android for local thread storage. So if you are developing a 
>> compiler it would still only take seconds.
> 
> To add onto that, you can also down it prebuilt, it also available on 
> most Linux distros because it is so widely used and adopted. So you 
> won't be building it yourself most of the time anyways.
> 

Dependencies are simple in theory. In practice things sometimes go 
wrong. Then you have to figure out why instead of just doing what you 
wanted to be doing. The worst case is when a dependency is causing build 
trouble in some component you don't need but the build is tangled up in 
a way that does not easily allow you to get only the component that you 
actually need. E.g., I once had to build a specific commit of llvm to 
compile a latex file. Of course that commit did not actually compile 
with the latest g++, etc. I don't really see why anyone should have to 
touch anything related to llvm to add some new feature to the parser.