ARM first & default LDC

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Saturday, 19 December 2020 at 19:51:37 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> On Saturday, 19 December 2020 at 19:38:10 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
> Grøstad wrote:
>>
>> You realise that creating a high quality backend that is 100% 
>> bug free takes a lot of effort and that you have to maintain 
>> it in perpetuity? It isn't sufficient that someone "just does 
>> it", it also has to be correct, efficient and updated.
>>
>
> This post made me think.
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/post/umfqzznlrongfrvictus@forum.dlang.org
>
> Read point number 3.
>
>
> Basically, there are problems with DMD, sometimes crashes and 
> has codegen bugs. Codegen bugs is definitely not something you 
> want in a big project because they are time consuming.
>
> Thank you for posting real commercial experience with D. If I 
> was a hard headed boss of the D project I would probably demand 
> that the DMD backend would be scrapped and efforts should focus 
> on stability with the support of GCC and LLVM backends.

Ilya has been working on a certain very important subset of work 
on behalf of Symmetry.  That mostly had to be @nogc because it 
needs to be usable as an Excel plugin as well as from our DSL.  
And we decided to do something that conventionally speaking you 
should never do - porting a critical library written in a hurry 
in C++ and still evolving to an emerging programming language 
(D).  C++ mangling and ABI interoperability isn't perfect now but 
is a lot better than the situation when we started. We did finish 
it, by the way, and achieved our technical and commercial goals.

I think we only build that codebase using LDC now but more 
generally we use LDC for release builds and dmd for development 
and it is not perfect, but it is overall fine. We build with dmd 
nightly as well to stay ahead of breakages coming down the line.

I love the existence of gdc and the incredible range of targets 
it supports.  I am also in awe at what Iain has been able to 
accomplish.  We don't use gdc currently only because for 
pragmatic reasons we need to have a more current front end - 
although gdc is much more up to date these days.

I wonder what amount of funding would be needed for a first 
version of an ARM back end for DMD.

More generally I don't think D is growing too slowly.  If 
anything if you zoom out the time horizon, I think many of the 
causes of frustration amongst some users in fact reflects the 
fact that it can take time for organisation to catch up with 
growth. It takes time, energy and committed and talented people 
to build organisation and these things take the time they take, 
particularly with an open source endeavour.