D is our last hope

[FeepingCreature]

On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 20:37:02 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/19/2023 12:07 PM, FeepingCreature wrote:
>> figure out a way to dogfood Phobos, it's insane that the 
>> premier project in the language refuses to use its stdlib)
>
> There is a good reason for that. It's very difficult to debug 
> the compiler when the reason it is failing is a code gen bug 
> that is breaking Phobos in some unknown way. Debugging Phobos 
> is (unfortunately) difficult because too much of Phobos imports 
> every other module in Phobos. (We'd like to fix that for the 
> next iteration of Phobos.)
>
> It's hard to port dmd to a new platform when it relies on 
> Phobos and Phobos is not working on the new platform, a 
> chicken-and-egg problem.
>
> In order for our ease of debugging, we keep dmd's dependence on 
> other code at a minimum.

This makes little sense to me. You wouldn't *start* by making DMD 
run on the new platform, but the port would start with a 
cross-build from your old platform to the new platform, surely? 
I'd want to have the testsuite and every other tool passing on 
the new platform before I even try running DMD natively. And this 
problem only arises when you try to run DMD natively from the 
start, right? Or am I misunderstanding?