Migrating dmd to D?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, March 06, 2013 02:44:07 Rob T wrote:
> On Wednesday, 6 March 2013 at 00:25:30 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> [...]
> 
> > My preference would be to completely replace the back-end with
> > LLVM. Why LLVM? Well as opposed to GCC it was designed from the
> > ground up to support many languages. The benefit here is that
> > it is possible to create standalone compiler the generates LLVM
> > bytecode that can then be run through LLVM. My understanding
> > (and I am happy to be corrected here) is that LLVM does not
> > need the front-end to be compiled into the back-end.
> 
> That seems like the most obvious direction to take. Is there any
> valid reason not to?

Because LDC already does that, there are potential legal issues with Walter 
working on other backends, and it's completely unnecessary. It's a shame that 
the stance of debian and some other distros makes it so that dmd can't be on 
them, but both gdc and ldc already exist and are both completely FOSS. The 
picky distros can just stick with those, and if anyone using them really wants 
the reference compiler, they can just install it themselves.

I agree that it sucks that dmd's backend is not fully open source, but the 
code is available to read and provide fixes for, and no code compiled by it is 
affected by the license. All it really affects is whether it can go on some 
Linux distros, and given that we have two other perfectly good compilers which 
_can_ go on such distros, I don't think that it's at all worth worrying about 
dmd's license. There are much, much more important things to worry about (like 
bug fixing).

- Jonathan M Davis