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

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, May 10, 2012 01:08:34 Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> 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.

Walter works on dmd's backend for a living. He's been working on it for over 
20 years. I don't think that he's going to be very interested in using another 
backend.

Also, he _can't_ use another backend (unless he creates a new one from 
scratch), because looking the code for another backend could cause legal 
issues for him when he works on dmd/dmc's backend for his actual job.

There may be other major reasons as well, but those alone would make it so 
that Walter isn't going to want to switch. Certainly, if it were something 
that Walter really thought was a good idea, I expect that he would have done 
so by now.

- Jonathan M Davis