D is our last hope

[Walter Bright]

On 12/19/2023 12:48 PM, FeepingCreature wrote:
> 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?

The test suite is carefully designed to test the compiler. It's proven to be 
really good at that, too. But when the compiler doesn't run because Phobos isn't 
working, I can't run the test suite.

Cross-compiling isn't been an option, and is still pretty darned clumsy with 
Windows<=>Linux.

The fewer the dependencies, the easier the debugging is. And tracking down 
obscure code gen bugs can be pretty hard enough.

There also isn't much that Phobos can add to the compiler. Some things that did 
help were just incorporated into the compiler source.