Official compiler

[Radu via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 00:35:01 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 22:57:20 +0000, Márcio Martins wrote:
>
>> I was reading the other thread "Speed kills" and was wondering 
>> if there is any practical reason why DMD is the official 
>> compiler?
>
> Walter Bright is the lead developer, and for legal reasons he 
> will never touch source code from a compiler he didn't write. 
> And since DMD is something like twice as fast as LDC, there's 
> at least some argument in favor of keeping it around.
>
> Should Walter retire, there's a reasonable chance that LDC will 
> become the primary compiler. However, compilation speed is 
> important.
>
> I'm not sure how different LDC and DMD are, but perhaps you 
> could use DMD for development and LDC for production builds?

Walter should not need to ever work on D compiler back-ends, 
there are *a lot* of issues to be dealt with in the language 
implementation that are front-end only or at least not backend 
related. There are others that can work/already work with the 
LLVM backend and they seam to know what they are doing.

There warts and issues in the language/runtime/phobos are well 
know, spending time fixing them is more valuable for the 
community rather than having Walter (maybe others) working on any 
dmd backend stuff.

As rsw0x suggested, a push to get LDC on sync with mainline, and 
switching to it after it would make more sense in the long run. 
Probably focusing on LDC and investing more man power will also 
help fix any perf issues re. compile time, there should bot be 
much to loose here at least for debug compile times.

All this of course depends on Walter's willing to give up working 
on DMD, whatever this means for him.