D has become unbearable and it needs to stop

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Jun 08, 2023 at 05:34:40PM +0000, Ernesto Castellotti via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 8 June 2023 at 17:20:25 UTC, Johan wrote:
> > So every release is maintaining the level of immaturity (note: .0
> > releases I don't even consider, .1 or .2 (what LDC uses) is slightly
> > better).
[...]
> Personally I only use GDC in production and I've never had any
> surprises with their releases, I honestly would never use DMD in
> production I consider the quality of the backend insufficient for
> serious use in production.  I don't want to say a heresy, but
> sincerely if I had to decide for D the first thing I would do is stop
> work on DMD I don't see the real usefulness when we have LDC and GDC.
> Probably the primary development could be done on LDC to not have to
> be conditioned by the release times of GCC.

DMD is Walter's baby, and he'll probably let it go only over his dead
body. :-D

To be fair, though, for all its flaws DMD has one upside: super-fast
compile speed, which is valuable during development because the shorter
your code-compile-test cycle is, the more productive you are.

For final builds of almost anything (except shell-script replacements
where codegen quality is irrelevant), I wouldn't touch DMD with a
10-foot pole. Its codegen quality is just too low, esp. when it comes to
performance of the resulting executable. Over the years I've
consistently gotten 30-40% speed improvements with LDC over DMD,
sometimes even 50%.  LDC is my go-to compiler for serious work.  Once in
a while I use gdc and find that it has comparable codegen quality to
LDC.


T

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.