On 9 August 2015 at 11:07, Johannes Pfau via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:

Am Sun, 9 Aug 2015 00:32:00 -0700
schrieb Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com>:

> On 8/8/2015 11:36 PM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
> > On Sunday, 9 August 2015 at 05:18:33 UTC, rsw0x wrote:
> >> dmd not being deprecated continues the cycle of gdc/ldc lagging
> >> versions behind and being understaffed in manpower.
> >
> > I think another point to look at is how far gdc and ldc have come
> > while still having so few people working on them. Clearly they are
> > able to get more done faster because they can leverage the work of
> > the llvm and gcc devs. Seems silly that the majority of our talent
> > is focused on dmd when it is the slowest of the bunch. D's "not
> > made here" syndrome strikes again!
>
> There's pretty much no talent focused on the dmd back end. I do most
> of the (very) occasional bug fixes, and sometimes Martin or Daniel
> correct something, and that's about it.
>
> The idea that it is sucking up resources is incorrect.
>

The DMD devs aren't working on the backend, but the GDC and LDC are
neither ;-) He's talking about the glue layer.

DMD has the advantage that whenever a frontend pull request requires
glue layer changes you get at and once by the contributor. But for
LDC and GDC the glue layer changes have to be implemented by GDC/LDC
devs.

I think that is more of a problem with length of development + number of contributors/changes.

For instance, when it was just Walter committing changes, the number of "fixed" bugs was of a reasonable number such that I could have gone through them all and tested them within a day (this is back when the D2 testsuite was private and I had no way other way to track whether or not codegen changes were required).

Now we have the testsuite, which seems to be a good enough gauge for finding problems. However if there's been a change (eg: refactor) between what codegen is lowered in the frontend vs. glue, then it becomes a commit hunt trawling through thousands of changes to work out which one is relevant to the new wrong-code-on-previously-working test. One day turns into a week, turns into a month, turns into half a year.

Iain.