Documentation generation

[bearophile]

The purpose of a static language compiler is to help the programmer spot the bugs in the code very well and to compile it. It's not the job of a compiler to create nice HTML/XML documentation files.

So I suggest to:
1) DMD can copy all documentation strings inside the JSON file generated with the -X option. DMD has just to recognize the /** */ and /// inside the D code and put only such comments inside the JSON (the JSON has to contain all the information necessary to create the HTML pages).
2) Move the code that understands DDoc syntax and generates the HTML docs inside an external utility written in D or Python, and keep such utility inside the zip of the standard DMD distribution. This program can ask DMD to generate the JSON files, can read them and generate the HTML pages. 
3) Deprecate and then remove the -D option of DMD2.

Removing that HTML ddoc parsing & HTML generation from DMD allows such code to evolve faster and to be debugged more efficiently. Today some people are using 

[Mostly unrelated: once xfbuild is well debugged it can be added inside the zip of the standard DMD distribution.]

Bye,
bearophile