why and how D can solve the next software crisis (was Re: Negative)

[Anders F Björklund]

Kevin Bealer wrote:

> 5. D is compile anywhere, run anywhere.
> 
> This is not true yet; would be immense to accomplish unless the D compiler was
> distributed with GCC.  This is unfortunate, since the DMD compiler is so fast
> and focused, but I think lack of platform portability is a killer for a compiler
> (but not so much for an interpreter for some reason.)
> 
> I see two possible futures in which D is ubiquitous, i.e. as much as Java now.
> 
> FUTURE 1: The DMD compiler is used for fast development and to run D "scripts".
> The high compile speed makes it perfect for scripting and rapid development on
> the platforms it does support, and GCC's D compiler makes sure the rest of the
> platforms don't have to go begging.  Everyone gets fast development and every
> platform can build binaries.  But GCC would need to support D out of the box.

I just don't see why GDC would have to be bundled with the rest of
the GNU Compiler Collection in order for it to be used everywhere ?

Yes, I know that the main GCC distribution also contains frontends for
Objective C, Fortran, Java, and Ada. But those are more "different"... ?

As it is now, most GCC-using systems support C and C++ "out of the box",
and if you want an "odd" language like Pascal or D - you go download it:

http://www.gnu-pascal.de/                 (GNU Pascal Compiler, gpc)
http://home.earthlink.net/~dvdfrdmn/d/    (GNU D Compiler, gdc)

We *should* probably get GDC listed at http://gcc.gnu.org/frontends.html
(putting it on the TODO list for next GDC release, along with new site)


But then again most people don't want GDC, but want DMD on all platforms
and only want a Digital-Mars-supported graphical interface such as DWT ?

And there isn't much anyone but Walter himself can do about those, IMHO.
(I don't have time for both, so I'll worry about the GNU / wx versions)


> FUTURE 2: The D compiler occupies a niche like Perl or Python, Tcl, etc, where
> there is one "blessed" compiler, but it still gets installed by everyone.  All
> of these seem to be scripting languages (why is that??).  The only way this can
> happen (I think) is if D supports every platform (very very much work, I
> think...) or can at least produce and run some kind of bytecode.
> 
> [ D in bytecode sounds tricky, but I don't know enough to know how many genuine
> obstacles there are.  I would think the "Java subset" of D could be done this
> way, but... ]

Color me sceptic, but I'm not too sure about "D the scripting language".
It just doesn't seem to be in the nature of the language, to do that...

I'd love to be wrong, by someone providing a .NET or Parrot backend :-)
But DMDScript is probably more likely to fill the DM scripting needs ?

--anders