Newsgroups, off-topic

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:50:37 -0400, Don <nospam at nospam.com> wrote:

> Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
>> Simen kjaeraas wrote:
>>> Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Maybe true, but I was thinking of it from a different angle -- why the
>>>> main D2 development does not switch backends.
>>> So which do you suggest be used instead - the one that doesn't work on
>>> Windows (no exceptions) or the one that requires Walter to give away
>>> all rights to his work?
>>>
>> 	Actually, gcc doesn't require Walter to give away all rights to his
>> work just to use it as a backend (or else the gdc project wouldn't
>> exist). It would require ceding the rights only if Walter wanted D
>> to be part of the official gcc distribution.
>>  		Jerome
>
> No, the problem is that it potentially makes him give away the rights to  
> the dmd backend. Which I think he can't legally do, even if he wanted to.

I don't think there is any danger of this, it would be well established  
that Walter wrote all his proprietary backend code before he viewed gcc  
source.  The danger is for future code he writes.

Personally, I am not too concerned about the backend performance, it's not  
critical to D at this time.  Someone, somewhere, will make this better,  
and then any code written in D magically gets faster :)  We're talking  
about decreasing the constant for the D compiler complexity, not  
decreasing the complexity.  Code built with dmd runs plenty fast for me  
(save the GC performance, maybe we can focus on that first?).

-Steve