Which patches/mods exists for current versions of the DMD parser?

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 16 September 2014 at 11:55:02 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
Grøstad wrote:
> I also think that the GPL would be a more fitting license for 
> D, given the democratic process and the community aspect.
>
> But I would not modify the source then. So the license sure 
> matters. MIT/BSD has traditionally been used for reference 
> implementations for commercial closed source refinement. It is 
> basically "take this and do whatever you want, no strings 
> attached, but don't blame me for failures" licenses.
>
> But you need to choose, because in open source:
>
> product == source-code + license
> support == forums/community
> end users == people who download the source-code
>
> We are only end users, not D devs. Maybe later devs, but 
> currently just end users that evaluate the "product", which 
> includes the license.

As I said, I think you're focusing on the license too much, as 
any open source license allows forking, though you're right that 
the MIT/BSD licenses usually provide more incentive to do so.  
Regardless of the license, some here view fragmenting dialects as 
a problem, ie the specter of fragmentation exists whatever the 
open source license chosen.

I know you don't think fragmentation is an issue, but for every 
one "dialect" like Turbo Pascal or Obj-C that subsequently 
thrived, there are probably dozens that failed and merely muddied 
the waters.  However, I think automated syntax translation might 
be a worthwhile solution for such syntax fragmentation these days.

> However a fork is no real threat to D for the following reasons:
>
> 1. Walter Bright is a good C++ programmer with intimate 
> knowledge of the D compiler internals. If a D dialect is good 
> he can implement the good features in the main branch with less 
> effort. Copyright does not constrain this. (only patents)
>
> 2. To fund a fork you probably have to close the source code 
> and target small specialised commercial markets. That means 
> high licensing costs. Which in turn means that for every sale 
> of a closed source dialect there will be 100s of users looking 
> for a free version. It could looked upon as free marketing.
>
> This is my take on this: I don't think a fork is a bad thing, 
> and I think BSD/MIT style licensing increase the probability of 
> a fork down the road compared to GPL. The payoff for forking is 
> simply higher with a liberal license.

Walter is well aware of the tradeoffs, as he's had his own code 
misappropriated before and still thinks the potential benefits of 
closed tools are worth it:

http://forum.dlang.org/post/lni676$111r$1@digitalmars.com