Official compiler

[Dibyendu Majumdar via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 06:19:27 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> I wish LLVM would switch to the Boost license, in particular 
> removing this clause:
>
> "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above 
> copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following 
> disclaimers in the documentation and/or other materials 
> provided with the distribution."
>
> Reading it adversely means if I write a simple utility and 
> include a few lines from LLVM, I have to include that license 
> in the binary and a means to print it out. If I include a bit 
> of code from several places, each with their own version of 
> that license, there's just a bunch of crap to deal with to be 
> in compliance.

Hi Walter,

I recall there was a thread in the LLVM mailing list last year 
about moving to a different license. So maybe that is on the 
cards, and the D community could chip on that conversation.

I feel that by moving an LLVM backend D will gain the help / 
expertise of a large number of companies that are working on LLVM 
including Microsoft & Google. Isn't Clang's claim that it is much 
faster than gcc when it comes to compiling? So maybe the speed of 
compilation using LLVM is not such an issue as presumably a lot 
of the cost in C++ compilation is in the front-end and with D the 
same issues won't arise?

In any case with scarce resources it seems wasteful to have 
people working on multiple backends - it would make more sense to 
converge to one backend - and LLVM being non-GPL and having a lot 
of momentum may be the best option.

I also feel that a lot of the C++ interfacing could be done by 
using the Clang libraries - again for similar reasons that you 
will gain from work already being done.

Regards
Dibyendu