Apple is officially moving away from Intel to a custom Arm chip

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 04:27:27PM +0000, Seb via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 24 June 2020 at 14:54:16 UTC, aberba wrote:
[...]
> > They're saying the transition will take two yrs. Seems they're
> > really serious about the move to Arm. Two yrs to get DMD to work on
> > Arm.

Why even bother, when LDC/GDC already support ARM (and have been for a
while now)?


> To clarify and avoid confusion I see absolutely no reason anyone would
> waste this huge effort of time into getting DMD to work on ARM as
> there are two superior and working compiler backends and thus this
> won't be happening.

Exactly.


> So yes you'll have to move away from DMD to LDC or GDC, but that
> shouldn't be a concern to anyone as even today with the amazing LDC
> team there's absolutely no reason to use DMD either. In fact I
> personally believe using DMD for production is irresponsible and at
> the very least should be strongly discouraged as mwe can't seem to
> convince the DFL/Walter to drop the DMD backend for obvious reasons.
> 
> Tl;Dr: it's just yet another nail in the coffin against DMD ...

To be fair, DMD does have amazingly fast compile times, which is very
useful during development -- a fast turnaround *really* helps boost
productivity during the code-compile-debug cycle.  I still use DMD for
development of isolated modules / subsets of dependent modules because
of this.

However, for production code, yeah, LDC is my first choice.  I'd still
use DMD for non-critical code (if only due to pure laziness), like
script-like programs and small utilities where program startup time
dominates execution time.  But for anything that's even remotely
performance-sensitive, I'd reach straight for LDC and not cast another
glance at DMD.


T

-- 
Obviously, some things aren't very obvious.