D-Day for DMD is today!

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Tuesday, September 01, 2015 09:44:17 Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On 9/1/15 6:48 AM, "Luís Marques  <luis at luismarques.eu> wrote:
> > On Sunday, 23 August 2015 at 05:17:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> >> We have made the switch from C++ DMD to D DMD!
> >
> > Is there a rough prediction of when the use of phobos in ddmd will start
> > to be accepted?
>
> I'm not a dmd dev, but I'm not sure it will be accepted, since phobos is
> very unstable. We have to be cautious about making dmd breakable easily
> by a change to phobos.
>
> Of course, I think there is a baseline dmd/gdc/ldc that must be used to
> build dmd, so perhaps as long as you use phobos features that work
> there, it will be OK.

Plenty of Phobos is stable and hasn't changed in quite a while. We do
sometimes deprecate stuff still, but there isn't much that gets deprecated
at this point, and the deprecation cycle is about two years. The common
problem would be regressions, and the compiler gets those as much or more
often than Phobos does. But it is true that some stuff in Phobos changes
occasionally, and that could affect how new a compiler you need to compile
the current dmd.

Regardless of that though, I know that at least some of the dmd developers
are against using Phobos simply because they don't want the dependency. It
simplifies things if Phobos isn't in the mix. If you have to track down and
fix a regression in the compiler, that's easier to do if you don't have to
worry about the standard library being in the mix. The less that the
compiler depends on, the less that the compiler devs have to worry about
affecting the compiler. And if we need anything to be sure of anything
working right, it's the compiler. Sure, there are some things in the
standard library that might be nice to use in the compiler, but that doesn't
mean that it's necessarily worth pulling in Phobos as a dependency, and if
it's something that's really useful, maybe it's worth duplicating in the
compiler code - or even making a version of it that's tailored to the
compiler's needs.

- Jonathan M Davis