About Andrei's interview, part 3

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 8/25/10 20:09 PDT, Daniel Gibson wrote:
> 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).

In brief, I didn't do my homework and rightly got shafted. Yet another 
instance of an old lesson.

Andrei