About Andrei's interview, part 3

[Daniel Gibson]

Ben White schrieb:
 > ... At the moment, Walter Bright's first priority is to finalize the 
64-bit
 > native compiler, after which he plans to focus on dynamic loading.
 >
 > At first I was like :D

Yeah, that's great news - I started a new project about 6 weeks ago 
still in D1, because D2 lacks AMD64 support (D1 has GDC).


What I found a bit misleading:
"All projects I mentioned [GDC, LDC] use the open-sourced reference 
front end to implement both D1 and D2, and trail behind the reference 
compiler by a few minor releases."

LDC hasn't done much within the last months (last source change 3 months 
ago, last change on D2 about a year ago if I understand the info in the 
SVN browser correctly) - they consider their D2 support "highly 
experimental (read: unusable)" - so I guess they're more than "a few 
minor releases" away from the current DMD D2 compiler.

GDC is actively worked on, since a few weeks ago they're heavily working 
on the D2 version again - but they're still working at version 2.020 
(which had major changes, e.g. immutable and including druntime).
That's more than "a few minor releases behind". Much of the interesting 
stuff (std.algorithm and ranges etc in phobos, alias this in the 
language, thread local storage as default, etc) is still missing.
The GDC guys are doing a great job (as far as I can judge), but I guess 
it'll take some more time until they're at a fairly recent version 
comparable to DMD 2.048 (and thus containing the features described in 
TLDP).


Cheers,
- Daniel