Official compiler

[Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d]

On 2/26/16 9:26 AM, Radu wrote:
> On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 13:11:11 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On 2/26/16 7:02 AM, Radu wrote:
>>> On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 11:01:46 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> I don't see anything unfair. gdc, ldc, and dmd are each as good as
>>>> their respective teams make them.
>>>>
>>>
>>> The lack of fairness comes from the way the ecosystem is setup, you have
>>> the reference compiler released, then everybody needs to catch up with
>>> it. Why not have others be part of the official release? This will
>>> undoubtedly increase the quality of the frontend and the glue layer, and
>>> probably the runtime, just because they will be tested on more
>>> architectures each release.
>>>
>>> No matter how you put it, both LDC and GDC are limited in manpower, and
>>> also caught in the merge game with mainline. This is a bottle neck if
>>> they need to attract more talent. Right of the bat you need to do a lot
>>> of grunt work handling different repos, each at their own revision, plus
>>> all the knowledge about build env and testing env.
>>
>> The issue here is the front-end not the back end. Daniel has already
>> stated this was a goal (to make the front end shared code). So it will
>> happen (I think Daniel has a pretty good record of following through,
>> we do have a D-based front end now after all).
>>
>> Any effort to make both LDC and GDC part of the "official" release
>> would be artificial -- instead of LDC and GDC getting released
>> "faster", they would simply hold up dmd's release until they caught
>> up. And this is probably more pressure than their developers need.
>>
>> When the front end is shared, then the releases will be quicker, and
>> you can be happier with it.
>>
>
> OK, a shared front end will be great!
>
> My main concern is that if they are not integrated withing the daily
> pull-merge-auto-test loop they will always tend to drift and get out of
> sync while trying to fix stuff that breaks.

I think the intention is to make all of the compilers supported with 
some reasonable form of CI (not sure if all PRs would be tested this 
way, because that may be too much of a burden on the test servers).

The idea is that ldc and gdc will get plenty of warning if something breaks.

-Steve