Self-hosting D compiler -- Coming Real Soon Now(tm)

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 10:58:00PM +0200, Andrej Mitrovic via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 9/10/14, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> > - Decide on policy on how many previous releases the current
> >   codebase must be buildable on (currently, it's just the previous
> >   release, as I understand it);
> 
> If by current you mean git-head, only git-head versions of DMD are
> compatible with git-head versions of druntime and phobos. Meaning it's
> normal that an e.g. 2.066 compiler will not build a Phobos commit
> after the commit tagged v2.066 (it may work for a while, but things
> usually break quick enough either through things like mangling changes
> or accepts-invalid bug fixes, to name a few).

If self-hosting is ever going to take off, we're gonna hafta restrict
dmd source code to be compilable with at least the previous dmd release.
Otherwise, we may end up with a compiler that can't be compiled unless
you've already compiled it first.


T

-- 
In theory, software is implemented according to the design that has been carefully worked out beforehand. In practice, design documents are written after the fact to describe the sorry mess that has gone on before.