GDC review process.

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 19/06/12 19:19, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> Had round one of the code review process, so I'm going to post the main issues
> here that most affect D users / the platforms they want to run on / the compiler
> version they want to use.

A somewhat different take on these issues -- we've several times now had 
discussions over the backend of DMD, and the whole "reference implementation not 
entirely free/open source" issue.  One of the points made in those discussions 
is that the issue is somewhat moot given that the real "reference 
implementation" is the frontend, and this already has at least 2 free backends 
(GCC and LLVM).

However, that point stops being moot the moment there are compiler-specific 
constraints that mean that code that will compile with DMD won't compile with 
GDC, or vice-versa.  If I can't use inline asm with GDC, or I have to go about 
it in a different way to DMD, then we can hardly say that GDC reflects the 
reference implementation.

It seems to me that guaranteeing equal capabilities between DMD and GDC should 
be a "red line" in determining what changes or deletions are acceptable or not.