Am Wed, 21 Dec 2016 08:18:48 -0500
schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org>:

> On 12/20/16 6:08 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > Hello, a few engineers at Red Hat are taking a look at using the D language on the desktop and have reached out to us. They have created a list of issues. We are on the top-level ones, and of course would appreciate any community help as well.
> >
> > https://gist.github.com/ximion/77dda83a9926f892c9a4fa0074d6bf2b
> 
> An engineer from Debian wrote down what's needed on the distribution side to give a green light to the D language:
> 
> https://gist.github.com/ximion/fe6264481319dd94c8308b1ea4e8207a
> 
> 
> Andrei
> 

"GDC does not support creating shared libraries at time, which is a big deal for distros which need it to reduce duplicate code and make security fixes easier."

You can cross that one off the list.

"GDC only supports an ancient version of the D standard library, which has many nice classes and also bugfixes missing."

We're at 2.068.2 now. Still old, but good enough to run the latest vibe.D release.


From a compiler dev point of view I think one of the most important issues is the stable ABI. Many of the compiler specific problems could be solved easily if we could mix code from different compilers.

Am Wed, 21 Dec 2016 15:46:19 +0000
schrieb Gerald <gerald.b.nunn@gmail.com>:

> Given that DMD is a non-starter for Linux packages, how feasible is it to simply deprecate GDC and declare LDC as the reference/production compiler for D?

Hey, GDC is still in active development ;-) We need some more time to catch up but we'll get there.

OTOH if people start compiling recent D code with compilers from debian stable you'll have to support old frontend versions anyway :-P

On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 17:49:43 UTC, Johannes Pfau wrote:
> We're at 2.068.2 now. Still old, but good enough to run the latest vibe.D release.

Just a quick heads up (and maybe motivation): the upcoming 0.8.0 release will drop the support for 2.068 ;-)

https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/vibe.d/commit/ce9c1250aeef97c948787192136e611525c3df3c

On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 06:33:52PM +0000, Brad Anderson via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> In theory the backend should be completely divorced from the frontend and people would be editing a libd repo or something and there wouldn't be a need for a reference compiler.

Isn't our plan to eventually split the backend from the frontend?  But I understand that will be a long process, given the current state of the code.


T

-- 
Why are you blatanly misspelling "blatant"? -- Branden Robinson

On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 16:41:56 UTC, hardreset wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 16:30:15 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 10:15:26 UTC, hardreset wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 23:08:28 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>> Hello, a few engineers at Red Hat are taking a look at using the D language on the desktop and have reached out to us. They have created a list of issues. We are on the top-level ones, and of course would appreciate any community help as well.
>>>
>>> Is moving to LLVM backend or LDC something that is on the roadmap?
>>
>> What does it mean to "move" to LDC? Why can't you use LDC now?
>
> Moving the reference compiler to LLVM as was suggested in the list.

I've never been able to understand why it matters. You can use LDC or GDC now. Slapping the name "reference compiler" on one of them won't change anything. I think most frontend developers prefer working in the DMD umbrella for speed and simplicity reasons. Editing and building DMD is dead simple.

In theory the backend should be completely divorced from the frontend and people would be editing a libd repo or something and there wouldn't be a need for a reference compiler.

On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 18:33:52 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 16:41:56 UTC, hardreset wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 16:30:15 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 10:15:26 UTC, hardreset wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 23:08:28 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>>> [...]
>>>>
>>>> Is moving to LLVM backend or LDC something that is on the roadmap?
>>>
>>> What does it mean to "move" to LDC? Why can't you use LDC now?
>>
>> Moving the reference compiler to LLVM as was suggested in the list.
>
> I've never been able to understand why it matters. You can use LDC or GDC now. Slapping the name "reference compiler" on one of them won't change anything. I think most frontend developers prefer working in the DMD umbrella for speed and simplicity reasons. Editing and building DMD is dead simple.
>
> In theory the backend should be completely divorced from the frontend and people would be editing a libd repo or something and there wouldn't be a need for a reference compiler.

It will simplify development process for DRuntime, LDC and GDC. In addition, DMD support for numeric libraries requires more efforts and workarounds. DMD is less documented then LLVM (this is important for numeric and betterC libraries) --Ilya

On 12/21/2016 12:49 PM, Johannes Pfau wrote:
> We're at 2.068.2 now.

Johannes, are you personally involved with gdc? If so please email me. Thanks! -- Andrei

On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 16:41:58 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 16:30:15 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 10:15:26 UTC, hardreset wrote:
>>> Is moving to LLVM backend or LDC something that is on the roadmap?
>>
>> What does it mean to "move" to LDC? Why can't you use LDC now?
>
> People that want to use D, want to use the latest and greatest. The reference compiler moves the fastest so they want the reference compiler to be switched to a different backend. Why a FOSS back end is required to use D depends on the person, usually it is political.

Any other backend would be better. DMD with -O takes over an hour for my project to compile. In comparison LDC with -O3 takes less than a minute and produces a faster binary. It doesn't really make sense to increase the workload maintaining 2-3 different compilers when D is already lacking manpower.

On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 21:12:07 UTC, Jerry wrote:
> Any other backend would be better. DMD with -O takes over an hour for my project to compile. In comparison LDC with -O3 takes less than a minute and produces a faster binary. It doesn't really make sense to increase the workload maintaining 2-3 different compilers when D is already lacking manpower.

A 60:1 speedup? I've never heard of that big of a difference before. Especially since LDC is typically slower to compile, even on massive code bases like Weka's.

Could you please file a bug with some details?

On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 21:12:07 UTC, Jerry wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 16:41:58 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 21 December 2016 at 16:30:15 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> People that want to use D, want to use the latest and greatest. The reference compiler moves the fastest so they want the reference compiler to be switched to a different backend. Why a FOSS back end is required to use D depends on the person, usually it is political.
>
> Any other backend would be better. DMD with -O takes over an hour for my project to compile. In comparison LDC with -O3 takes less than a minute and produces a faster binary. It doesn't really make sense to increase the workload maintaining 2-3 different compilers when D is already lacking manpower.

That sounds like a bug in the DMD backend...