[dmd-internals] building dmd with the microsoft compiler

[Walter Bright]

On 11/13/2011 8:13 AM, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>
>
> I have patched the compiler to use handcrafted implementations and it now 
> passes the dmd test suite.
>
> Quite a bit to my surprise, the compiler is also almost twice as fast on my 
> projects as the dmc compiled dmd! The test suite runs a bit slower though (5% 
> to 10%).

Hmm, very curious. I wonder what the speed changes are due to.

>
> Is there interest in adding the patches to the dmd source? I would like to do 
> some cleanup before creating a pull request.

Sure.

>
> The major changes are with respect to the 80-bit floats, because this also 
> leaks into the backend. Mostly, it's replacing "long double" with my 
> implementation "long_double". I've seen "d-gcc-real.h" being used if IN_GCC  
> is defined, but the defined type real_t is only referred to partially. I 
> wonder whether this is still in use (by LDC/GDC?) and whether it ever passed 
> the test suites?

I don't know the status of IN_GCC. I wouldn't use it for the VC build.

>
> The C99 printf functions are overloaded by inserting an include file on the 
> command line, I would prefer if these would go into port.c/h, but these would 
> need to be included by the backend aswell then.

They should go in port, or perhaps we should just dispense with using the C99 
formats.