On Monday, 14 December 2020 at 04:35:31 UTC, 9il wrote:
> ARM is going to conquer laptop and PC markets in the next few years.

[Citation needed]

I agree that ARM is an important architecture, and will probably become even moreso in the next few years. But AMD, at least, is not standing still and Intel's microarchitectures are still excellent; they just need to manufacture them on a better process to become highly competitive again.

I agree with ARM, it should be something everyone could target (crosstarget) easily

As for LDC as default, i disagree, compilation time with LDC is very slow, even in debug mode, so DMD should stay default for the sake of quick iteration during development

On Monday, 14 December 2020 at 04:35:31 UTC, 9il wrote:
> ARM is going to conquer laptop and PC markets in the next few years.

I work with ARM daily (automotive) and I'm skeptical of that assumption. Sure Apple is moving over, but that's a more centralised and controlled ecosystem. It won't be as easy with Windows or GNU+Linux.

Why would the developers put in all that effort if it turns out to be another "Year of the Linux desktop" or "Rust is superior and everyone will be using it"?It would be safer and less of a hassle to react to market conditions than to predict and preempt them.

Let the chips fall where they may, and work based on that. It's too early yet.

On Monday, 14 December 2020 at 13:36:45 UTC, 9il wrote:
> The meaning of `default` has been described in the following sentences of the original post, maybe in a bit strange form because of my English level. We would always have a default compiler or say `master` compiler. Changes go to DMD first and then to other compilers. A one with an ARM notebook can compile, run, test, and patch LDC, but actually, she/he would need to patch DMD, which can't be compiled for ARM.

I don't think the development of the front end should depend on any particular backend, there should be a proper abstraction layer.

The proper fix is to decouple dmd from the dmd backend through a high level IR that can support borrowing and ARC.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 08:06:34 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>
> I work with ARM daily (automotive) and I'm skeptical of that assumption. Sure Apple is moving over, but that's a more centralised and controlled ecosystem. It won't be as easy with Windows or GNU+Linux.
>
> Why would the developers put in all that effort if it turns out to be another "Year of the Linux desktop" or "Rust is superior and everyone will be using it"?It would be safer and less of a hassle to react to market conditions than to predict and preempt them.
>
> Let the chips fall where they may, and work based on that. It's too early yet.

Apple might have gone over to ARM but in the Windows world x86 isn't going away anytime soon. There is simply too much SW for x86 for people making the switch. There are x86 emulators but the performance is probably not satisfactory right now.

I would rather say that ARM is getting more competition in embedded. Because of the recent sales of ARM, this is enough to get some people scared. They believe that the business model of ARM is going away or they will refocus. Regardless if this is true or not some are looking at alternatives and that might be RISC V. Also where cost is important RISC V will have an advantage. The rising star in my opinion is RISC V.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 10:13:41 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 08:06:34 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Apple might have gone over to ARM but in the Windows world x86 isn't going away anytime soon. There is simply too much SW for x86 for people making the switch. There are x86 emulators but the performance is probably not satisfactory right now.

Apple can emulate x86 quite fast, we can expect MS can do the same.

> I would rather say that ARM is getting more competition in embedded. Because of the recent sales of ARM, this is enough to get some people scared. They believe that the business model of ARM is going away or they will refocus. Regardless if this is true or not some are looking at alternatives and that might be RISC V. Also where cost is important RISC V will have an advantage. The rising star in my opinion is RISC V.

Agreed. And this looks like another one reason to make the LLVM backend default.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 12:04:38 UTC, 9il wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 10:13:41 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 08:06:34 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
> Agreed. And this looks like another one reason to make the LLVM backend default.

Not really. All those targets will need runtime support from the foundation. As is, runtime support aside from X86, AMD64 is somewhat lacklustre even on GDC and LDC, and it's not easy to produce runtimes.

In my opinion it's best to have a bleeding-edge implementation that the foundation can work out language issues and experiment on and then other compilers that can focus on multi-targeting and LLVM/GCC interfacing.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 10:13:41 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 08:06:34 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>>
>> I work with ARM daily (automotive) and I'm skeptical of that assumption. Sure Apple is moving over, but that's a more centralised and controlled ecosystem. It won't be as easy with Windows or GNU+Linux.
>>
>> Why would the developers put in all that effort if it turns out to be another "Year of the Linux desktop" or "Rust is superior and everyone will be using it"?It would be safer and less of a hassle to react to market conditions than to predict and preempt them.
>>
>> Let the chips fall where they may, and work based on that. It's too early yet.
>
> Apple might have gone over to ARM but in the Windows world x86 isn't going away anytime soon. There is simply too much SW for x86 for people making the switch. There are x86 emulators but the performance is probably not satisfactory right now.
>
> I would rather say that ARM is getting more competition in embedded. Because of the recent sales of ARM, this is enough to get some people scared. They believe that the business model of ARM is going away or they will refocus. Regardless if this is true or not some are looking at alternatives and that might be RISC V. Also where cost is important RISC V will have an advantage. The rising star in my opinion is RISC V.

32 bit ARM chips are $5.32 AUD for a single unit. If the RISC-V can come out much cheaper then mass produced items will be probably be the first to mass-migrate. A dollar or two difference might not mean much to a hobbyist but in a production line that scales up to thousands -> tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. From there it'd probably snow ball into other fields. Electronics / embedded production (and its firmware) is ever changing and would make the most sense to gnaw at that market before attempting to conquer PC.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 12:04:38 UTC, 9il wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 10:13:41 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 08:06:34 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> Apple might have gone over to ARM but in the Windows world x86 isn't going away anytime soon. There is simply too much SW for x86 for people making the switch. There are x86 emulators but the performance is probably not satisfactory right now.
>
> Apple can emulate x86 quite fast, we can expect MS can do the same.
>
>> I would rather say that ARM is getting more competition in embedded. Because of the recent sales of ARM, this is enough to get some people scared. They believe that the business model of ARM is going away or they will refocus. Regardless if this is true or not some are looking at alternatives and that might be RISC V. Also where cost is important RISC V will have an advantage. The rising star in my opinion is RISC V.
>
> Agreed. And this looks like another one reason to make the LLVM backend default.

So we fragment the ecosystem just to make it easier to use a compiler that anyone bothering to use D in the first place will see either on the website or by googling "dlang arm"? Previous fragmentations (i.e. Tango from 10 years ago) *still* come up in discussions of D - even on hackernews where people have actually heard of us.

This is just bikeshedding. If people want to run D on their RISC-V cores they'll have ldc and gcc to choose from, anyone actually using a non-x86 ISA wont have any problem with that.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 12:04:38 UTC, 9il wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2020 at 10:13:41 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
>> I would rather say that ARM is getting more competition in embedded. Because of the recent sales of ARM, this is enough to get some people scared. They believe that the business model of ARM is going away or they will refocus. Regardless if this is true or not some are looking at alternatives and that might be RISC V. Also where cost is important RISC V will have an advantage. The rising star in my opinion is RISC V.
>
> Agreed. And this looks like another one reason to make the LLVM backend default.

As far as I know, only GDC supports RISC-V as a first class citizen.  So another reason *not* to make LLVM backend the default, actually. ;-)