D is not a compiler, it is a language. Furthermore it is not true that DMDs backend is rubbish and there are already more backends than just the DMC backend.
Sorry, I was generalising a little general in that claim. And where I say 'rubbish', I was drawing comparison to the maturity of C compilers for x86, which STILL have trouble and make lots of mistakes with centuries of man hours of work.
DMD has inferior code gen (there was a post last night comparing some disassemblies of trivial programs with GDC), will probably never rival GCC, that's fine, it's a reference, I get that.
But to say that using GDC will magically fix code gen is also false. I'm not familiar with the GCC code, so I may be wrong, but my understanding is that there is frontend work, and frontend-GCC glue work that will allow for back end optimisation (which GCC can do quite well) to work properly. This is still a lot of work for a small OSS team.
I also wonder if the D language provides some opportunities for optimisation that aren't expressible in other languages, and therefore may not already have an expression in the GCC back end... so I can imagine some of future optimisations frequently discussed in this forum won't just magically appear with GCC/LLVM maturity. I can't imagine Iain and co extending the GCC back end to support some obscure D optimisations happening any time soon.
The point I was making (which you seem to have missed thanks to my inflamatory comment ;), was that I don't have faith that compiler maturity will solve all these problems in prompt time, and even if they do for x86, what about for less common architectures that receive a lot less love (as is also the case in C)?
I make this argument in support of the language expressing optimal constructs with ease and by default, rather than expressing some concept that feels nice to programmers, but puts a burden on the whole-program-optimiser to fix.
For example, virtual-by-default RELIES on whole-program-optimisation to fix, whereas final by default has no performance implications, and will produce the best code automatically.
I think it would be nice if you stopped spreading FUD. You seem to have reasonable requests.
Perhaps a fair request, but I only do this because after a couple of months now, I have a good measure of FUD, and I receive very little response to anything I've raised that would make me feel otherwise.
The most distressing thing to me is the pattern I see where most of my more trivial (but still significant) points are outright dismissed, and the hard ones are ignored, rather than reasonably argued and putting my FUD to rest. :)
I also accept that I produce very little evidence to support any of my claims, so I'm easy to ignore, but this is because all my work and experience is commercial, private, and I can't easily extract anything without wasting a lot of work time to present it... not to mention breaking NDA's. Most problem cases aren't trivial, require a large context to prove with benchmarks. I can't easily write a few lines and say "here you go".
At some level I'd like to think people would accept the word of a seasoned game engine dev who's genuinely interested in adopting the language for that sort of work, but I completely understand those who are skeptical. ;)