Joakim interviewed Liran for the D Blog about their file system, Matrix, and their use of D. Thanks to Joakim for putting it together, and to Liran for taking the time to participate!

Blog:
https://dlang.org/blog/2018/12/04/interview-liran-zvibel-of-wekaio/

Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a3106x/interview_liran_zvibel_of_wekaio/

On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Joakim interviewed Liran for the D Blog about their file system, Matrix, and their use of D. Thanks to Joakim for putting it together, and to Liran for taking the time to participate!
>
> Blog:
> https://dlang.org/blog/2018/12/04/interview-liran-zvibel-of-wekaio/
>
> Reddit:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a3106x/interview_liran_zvibel_of_wekaio/

Great to see this finally up! I agree with the only proggit comment though: the title is not descriptive enough for reddit/HN, as I doubt most have heard of Liran or Weka.

On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 17:15:44 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

>
> Great to see this finally up! I agree with the only proggit comment though: the title is not descriptive enough for reddit/HN, as I doubt most have heard of Liran or Weka.

It's on HN now under a better title.

On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 06:50:13 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 17:15:44 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>
>>
>> Great to see this finally up! I agree with the only proggit comment though: the title is not descriptive enough for reddit/HN, as I doubt most have heard of Liran or Weka.
>
> It's on HN now under a better title.

Thanks, let's see if it does any better. I asked Atila to submit it to lobste.rs too, his mutex post did well on there last month:

https://lobste.rs/t/d

On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Joakim interviewed Liran for the D Blog about their file system, Matrix, and their use of D. Thanks to Joakim for putting it together, and to Liran for taking the time to participate!
>
> Blog:
> https://dlang.org/blog/2018/12/04/interview-liran-zvibel-of-wekaio/
>
> Reddit:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a3106x/interview_liran_zvibel_of_wekaio/

Interesting read. I am new to dlang, and after reading the post, I asked myself: the company liked the language, but tweaked the compiler. Could the company now switch to one of the official compilers? If not, why?

On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 08:02:21 UTC, M.M. wrote:
> On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> Joakim interviewed Liran for the D Blog about their file system, Matrix, and their use of D. Thanks to Joakim for putting it together, and to Liran for taking the time to participate!
>>
>> Blog:
>> https://dlang.org/blog/2018/12/04/interview-liran-zvibel-of-wekaio/
>>
>> Reddit:
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a3106x/interview_liran_zvibel_of_wekaio/
>
> Interesting read. I am new to dlang, and after reading the post, I asked myself: the company liked the language, but tweaked the compiler. Could the company now switch to one of the official compilers? If not, why?

LDC _is_ an official compiler, they just use a slightly modified version of LDC (with LTO & PGO'd against their codebase). I

On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 08:02:21 UTC, M.M. wrote:
> On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> Joakim interviewed Liran for the D Blog about their file system, Matrix, and their use of D. Thanks to Joakim for putting it together, and to Liran for taking the time to participate!
>>
>> Blog:
>> https://dlang.org/blog/2018/12/04/interview-liran-zvibel-of-wekaio/
>>
>> Reddit:
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a3106x/interview_liran_zvibel_of_wekaio/
>
> Interesting read. I am new to dlang, and after reading the post, I asked myself: the company liked the language, but tweaked the compiler. Could the company now switch to one of the official compilers? If not, why?

All three compilers listed on the official download page use the same frontend, written in D:

https://dlang.org/download

The LDC and GDC teams take that DMD frontend and attach it to the LLVM and GCC code-generation backends.

As for Weka's tweaks, github shows these different commits from their last 1.11 release to the official tag:

https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/compare/v1.11.0...weka-io:weka-2.071

I get the sense that's mostly patches backported from newer LDC releases, as they understandably go slower than official LDC for stability, and some git cruft from maintaining their own branch. Their tweaks don't appear to be substantial on a skim, which makes sense since Johan is a committer on the LDC team.

Since LDC is an OSS project, they're free to tweak it for their own use and use it as they like. Johan has done much work for them which they've contributed back upstream to LDC. See Johan's blog posts for more info:

http://johanengelen.github.io

On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 13:30:21 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 08:02:21 UTC, M.M. wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> Interesting read. I am new to dlang, and after reading the post, I asked myself: the company liked the language, but tweaked the compiler. Could the company now switch to one of the official compilers? If not, why?
>
> All three compilers listed on the official download page use the same frontend, written in D:
>
> https://dlang.org/download
>
> The LDC and GDC teams take that DMD frontend and attach it to the LLVM and GCC code-generation backends.
>
> As for Weka's tweaks, github shows these different commits from their last 1.11 release to the official tag:
>
> https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/compare/v1.11.0...weka-io:weka-2.071

Sorry, I compared the wrong Weka branch. Here's the right tag, shows fewer commits different:

https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/compare/v1.11.0...weka-io:weka-v1.11

On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 13:30:21 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 08:02:21 UTC, M.M. wrote:
>> [...]
>
> All three compilers listed on the official download page use the same frontend, written in D:
>
> [...]

This explains pretty much everything I wanted to know but was afraid to ask. Happy to hear about the backporting to LDC as well...