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

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 10/05/12 00:53, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> But since that will never happen, it's a moot issue. It doesn't really matter
> if we would have had 10 times as many people contributing (which I very much
> doubt), Walter can't change the backend's license, so we're stuck with how
> things are. There's really no point in arguing about how it affects us (be it
> positively or negatively), since we can't do anything about it.
>
> But gdc and ldc _do_ exist, so for the really picky people, there are fully
> FOSS options. And as the front-end stabilizes, which backend you use should
> matter less and less, so it should become less and less of an issue.

I don't understand why the project couldn't (or wouldn't) simply bless GDC or 
LDC as the reference implementation.  I do see why in the short term, as 
finalizing/stabilizing the front end, runtime and development library are much 
higher-priority goals, but in the longer term it seems like a viable possibility.

It also seems beneficial to do so given that GDC and LDC offer much better 
possibilities for supporting architectures beyond x86/x86-64.