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

[ianc]

In article <du91ou$1rd4$1 at digitaldaemon.com>,
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Anders_F_Bj=F6rklund?= says...
>
>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

Anders, despite my inital thoughts D does not probably need to be part of gcc
install. The desktop has settled on x86 and dmd is strong there. Any idea what
Digital Mars biz model is for D when version 1 is released?