Lack of open source shown as negative part of D on Dr. Dobbs

[David Nadlinger]

On Wednesday, 9 May 2012 at 16:20:55 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 
wrote:
> One way round the situation might be to try and coordinate 
> releases of DMD, GDC and LDC[1] so that they are 
> feature-equivalent and have passed the same set of tests, with 
> official announcements giving equal weight and endorsement to 
> these compilers.

This would be great, but at least for LDC, the biggest problem at 
the moment in that regard is manpower –currently, most of us 
primarily work on it whenever it doesn't compile our own projects 
(and when specific bug reports come in, obviously). This works 
reasonably well, e.g. Alexey merged the 2.059 frontend more than 
2 1/2 weeks ago, which is not terribly late (where is GDC right 
now, btw?), but could quite clearly be improved. At least 
personally, though, I'd currently find it hard to commit to 
releasing simultaneously with DMD, because it might entail doing 
larger amounts of merging/testing work on short notice as long as 
there isn't at least some kind of semi-formal release schedule 
for DMD.

> [1] I'm not sure of the status of LDC regarding D2 -- I have 
> the impression that GDC is further ahead and has developed 
> better procedures for integrating updates to the D frontend ... 
> ?

Thanks to the great job Iain did on GDC, it is true that LDC is 
probably a bit less stable right now, but D2 is the main target 
in terms of developer effort for LDC now as well.

David