Marketing D [ was Re: GCC 4.6 ]

[Walter Bright]

Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> On 10/31/2010 06:30 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> Yes, and GDC and LDC are 100% GPL.
> 
> That's nice, except that neither are suitable as a replacement for your 
> proprietary D2 compiler, which is the reference compiler and where all 
> the bleeding edge work is done.
> 
> So strong statements like "D is fully open source" are misleading.
 > The
> open source compilers are always playing catch-up, and the people that 
> could be helping you out on the compiler are instead replicating your 
> efforts.


I don't agree. There's very little, almost no, D specific support in the dmd 
back end. It's a C compiler back end. Nearly all the work is done in the front 
end, which should be little more than a cut & paste job for LDC and GDC once 
they are already up and running with the front end.

The bugfix patches are nearly all tagged with specific updates to the source, so 
any one critical patch can be easily applied.

There are 3 D compilers, 2.5 of which are GPL, and the source is available for 
the rest.