Migrating dmd to D?

[SomeDude]

On Saturday, 2 March 2013 at 14:47:55 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
> On Saturday, 2 March 2013 at 07:16:04 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
>> On Saturday, 2 March 2013 at 06:50:32 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
>>>
>>> Exactly. This fixed subset would be very limited in 
>>> comparison to the full language (I can imagine something 
>>> looking a bit like a smaller Go, there would probably be no 
>>> templates at all, no CTFE, maybe even no exceptions, for 
>>> instance), but would be orthogonal, completely stable in 
>>> terms of spec, and known to work. It could be defined for 
>>> other real world usages as well, like embedding in small 
>>> appliances.
>>
>> It would also make it easy to bootstrap the compiler on new 
>> platforms.
>
> I don't see how this would help with proting to different 
> platofrms at all if you have a cross-compiler.
>
> Yes, the DMD frontend currently isn't really built with 
> cross-compilation in mind (e.g. using the host's floating point 
> arithmetic for constant folding/CTFE), but once this has been 
> changed, I don't see how the language used would make any 
> difference in re-targetting at all.
>
> You simply use another host system (e.g. Windows/Linux x86) 
> until the new backend/runtime is stable enough for the compiler 
> to self-host.
>
> David

And what if you *don't* have a cross compiler ? You compile the D 
subset (bootstrapper) in C and off you go (provided you have a 
reasonable C compiler on that platform).