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

[ketmar via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2014 10:35:09 +0000
Dicebot via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> As a package maintainer I have no problem with chained building 
> of the compiler. Will take quite some time when its needed but 
> nothing critical.
some people like to experiment with bleeding edge versions.
incidentally, those are people who are most willing to contribute,
either sporadically ("hey, i found a bug in your HEAD! ;-)") or by
becoming dedicated developers. but if they neeed to do that, and that,
and then compile that, and that, and... just to play with something,
they will drop it and switch to another toy with lighter entry barriers.
or start using prepackaged versions and stop fixing bugs: "ah, it's an
old version, and i don't want to rebuild it anyway, so... let's wait
unitl that fixed, and use ugly hackarounds for now".

one of the best features of D (somebody sees that as a weakness, but i
believe that this is killer feature) is it's changing nature. there are
alot of idiotic legacy in C++, and nobody can fix that -- due to C++ is
"designed by committee" now and due to alot of legacy code that will
break. pushing changes to D is hard, but *way* easier than to C++. and
having easily-buildable compiler that needs only system C++
compiler to be built encourages people to experiment.

DMD is great for experiments: it builds very fast, it's small, it's
self-contained and requires only C++ toolchain. yet it has proprietary
codegen, so it can't be put in repositories of free software. and if
DMD will become self-hosted, people will need to install *another* D
compiler just to build DMD. this will turn off many potential
contributors and volunteer evangelists. and DMD is proprietary in the
eyes of FOSS-dedicated people, so many of them will not agree to use
prebuilt DMD binaries to rebuild DMD too.

sure, this is not a big deal for windows and macos people, but it's the
big deal for GNU/Linux developers. not D users, but potential
developers of D itself. it's moderately acceptably to use compiler with
proprietary codegen if it comes with full source code and can be built
with system-provided toolchain, but it's not OK to depend of binary
blobs to build it.

please note that i'm not talking about people who just using D to
writing their code, but about people who found D fun and want to
contribute. i myself dreaming of times when GDC will get more
developers to keep it in sync with HEAD frontend, so i can write my
patches against GDC and then porting 'em to DMD, not vice versa.
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