Migrating D front end to D - post Dconf

[Daniel Murphy]

"David Nadlinger" <see at klickverbot.at> wrote in message 
news:wynfxitcgpiggwemrmkx at forum.dlang.org...
> On Saturday, 11 May 2013 at 17:36:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> - Breakages in Phobos will be experienced early on a large system using 
>> them
>>
>> I've talked about this with Simon Peyton-Jones who was unequivocal to 
>> assert that writing the Haskell compiler in Haskell has had enormous 
>> benefits in improving its quality.
>
> This.
>
> If we aren't confident that we can write and maintain a large real-world 
> application in D just yet, we must pull the emergency brakes on the whole 
> DDDMD effort, right now.
>
> David

I'm confident in D, just not in phobos.  Even if phobos didn't exist, we'd 
still be in better shape using D than C++.  What exactly are we going to 
need from phobos?  sockets?  std.datetime? std.regex? std.container?

If we use them in the compiler, we effectively freeze them.  We can't use 
the new modules, because the old toolchains don't have them.  We can't fix 
old broken modules because the compiler depends on them.  If you add code to 
work around old modules being gone in later versions, you pretty much end up 
moving the source into the compiler after all.

If we only need to be able to compile with a version from 6 months ago, this 
is not a problem.  A year and it's still workable.  But two years?  Three? 
We can get something right here that gcc got so horribly wrong.