DMD, GDC, LDC [was Re: Ready for review: new std.uni]

[Russel Winder]

On Mon, 2013-01-14 at 06:33 +0100, David Nadlinger wrote:
> On Monday, 14 January 2013 at 04:42:33 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> wrote:
> > I'll candidly mention that David's request was unclear to me. 
> > It's been winding enough that I missed the key sentence. Was it 
> > that we switch dmd to using llvm as backend?
> 
> If you want, yes - but not in the form of an actionable proposal 
> yet. I was trying to argue that the benefits of using an existing 
> solution like GCC or LLVM are large enough (resp. the costs of 
> using a custom backend high enough) that we should seriously 
> consider doing so. Especially because it looks as if the amount 
> of work needed to keep the DMD backend and thus the reference D 
> compiler competitive is going to increase further as other 
> backends are gaining things like auto-vectorization to light up 
> modern CPUs and ARM is gaining in importance.

Having D in the GCC set is a good move for marketing the D language. GDC
could be a vehicle for bringing more programmers to D but it needs more
resource to bring it up to date.

Having D in the LLVM set is a good move for marketing the D language.
LDC is a vehicle for bringing people to D. It would be good to get the
Debian package updated and actively kept up. This would then get it
packaged for Ubuntu and Mint. It would be good to get it packaged for
Fedora.

Keeping going with DMD is fine, as long as it is in the knowledge that
GDC and LDC are the D toolchains that will lead to wider D usage.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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