My Long Term Vision for the D programming language

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 12:04:57AM +0000, Stefan Koch via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 16 November 2021 at 23:55:03 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> > > ...
> > > D 27:
> > > 
> > > * Compiler daemon thing.
[...]
> > Even if there was a consensus on that, you already noted that it
> > does not matter. This requires massive refactoring of the DMD code
> > base.
> 
> Refactoring is putting it mildly.
> 
> It needs a fundamental different approach to how we do
> semantic-analysis/code-transformation/code-insertion/code-expansion.

Yeah, no kidding.  It will require basically a rewrite of everything in
the compiler except for parsing / codegen, as Stefan says. Actually, I'm
not even sure about the parsing part, if you're going to expect the
compiler-as-a-daemon to handle on-the-fly code changes.

And given the number of quirks in the current DMDFE, such a thing will
probably turn out to have different interpretations of the language when
fed existing code. IIRC SDC ran into this problem: after a certain point
deadalnix discovered ambiguities in the spec that would lead to
divergent parses / semantics of the same code. So in order for such an
effort not to turn out to be a waste, the spec must be nailed down
first.


T

-- 
Elegant or ugly code as well as fine or rude sentences have something in common: they don't depend on the language. -- Luca De Vitis