Migrating D front end to D - post Dconf

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 5/11/13 2:15 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "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.

But you're exactly enumerating the problems any D user would face when 
we make breaking changes to Phobos.

Andrei