D Compiler as a Library

[Manu]

On 14 April 2012 16:51, deadalnix <deadalnix at gmail.com> wrote:

> Le 14/04/2012 12:35, Manu a écrit :
>
>> On 13 April 2012 18:25, Jakob Ovrum <jakobovrum at gmail.com
>> <mailto:jakobovrum at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>    On Friday, 13 April 2012 at 13:08:51 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>>
>>        SDC have a lot of theses, and I proposed a similar stuff for its
>>        evolution. I think it is easier for SDC than it is for dmd
>>        considering the codebase of both.
>>
>>
>>    I think we've got the lexer and parser completely separate from
>>    most of the rest of the codebase (like the codegen), due to
>>    repeated requests from people who wanted to use these parts for
>>    IDEs and other tools.
>>
>>    I've yet to see anyone actually go through with using it though,
>>    possibly because there is no documentation for a lot of it.
>>    Documenting these parts fully into something of a public API and
>>    then putting it online is definitely on the todo list. Perhaps
>>    there would be more motivation to do this rather than work on
>>    something else if someone actually tried using SDC in their
>>    project instead of just talking about it, so it's kind of a
>>    catch-22.
>>
>>    That said, the parser is currently evolving alongside the
>>    codegen. When we want to start implementing new parts of the
>>    language, we iteratively add it to the parser, hence it's not
>>    complete. It's very easy to work with though and it's mostly a
>>    menial task (although it's kind of fun to produce beautiful
>>    parser errors :P).
>>
>>    Anyway, for anyone interested, you can find us on Github and
>>    #d.sdc on FreeNode.
>>
>>
>> Just out of curiosity, why would anyone write a code gen these days?
>> With projects like LLVM, which can perform great codegen to basically
>> any architecture, you'd be crazy not to use that...
>> Surely 90% of the value of writing your own D compiler would be the
>> unique front end, which may have different design principles (like use
>> as a lib, usable on tools and stuff as discussed here) ?
>>
>> I'm sorry to say, if you write your own codegen, I would never use your
>> compiler. If you use LLVM in the back end, I'll definitely give it a
>> look, then merit will depend entirely on the front end (speed,
>> flexibility, quality of error messages, runtime error detection, etc).
>> I know it's a fun exercise to write a codegen, so from an educational
>> perspective, sure, it's valuable to you as a programmer, but I don't
>> think it helps your project at all.
>>
>
> Codegen is done by LLVM in SDC, but you still need some codegen glue.
>

Ah okay, cool. NM me then :P
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