Official compiler

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 18 February 2016 at 12:16:49 UTC, Radu wrote:
> My simple assumption is that if presumably the dmd backend is 
> not maintained anymore, a lot of the core dmd people can focus 
> on improving whatever problems the frontend or glue layers have.

That's what they're already doing. Very little work is done on 
the backend (which is part of why it doesn't optimize as well as 
gcc or llvm). Occasionally, work has to be done on the backend, 
but by and large, the dmd devs are working on the frontend, which 
benefits gdc and ldc just as much as it does dmd. Now, that 
doesn't change the fact that the gdc and ldc guys could use more 
help, but and if the dmd backend were dropped, then presumably 
some of the work being done on the frontend would be going to the 
glue layer for either gdc or ldc, but that would further slow 
down the development of the frontend and not necessarily improve 
things overall.

Regardless, losing dmd's backend would be a _huge_ loss. Yes, the 
binaries that it generates are slower, but its faster compilation 
times are a huge win for developers and can significantly improve 
the development time of a project. It also has served us very 
well in impressing and attracting programmers to D. Ultimately, 
we want all three compilers with all three backends to be 
well-maintained and usable, because they each have their pros and 
cons.

- Jonathan M Davis